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Product Description
This family memoir of life in the shadow of "The Sun"-the twentieth century's greatest painter-who towered over the lives of his wives, children, and grandchildren, is told by Marina Picasso, the granddaughter of Picasso and his first wife, Olga Kokhlova, a former Russian ballerina who remained married to him until her death.
Writers, artists, and film stars installed themselves in Picasso's orbit, even as his family lived in impoverished conditions, in terror of provoking his displeasure, unable to carve lives and identities of their own for the control he exerted over their every move. After years of humiliation, her father drank himself to death. Then, the day after Picasso's death, her brother poisoned himself. Marina's own estrangement and subsequent breakdown followed, until at last, through grief and awakening, she found herself and came to terms with the blessings and curses of the Picasso legacy. The result is this fascinating and operatic account of her grandfather's first family.
Fame, tragedy, glamour, excess, passion, betrayal, and redemption: All the essential ingredients for a compelling family drama are in full force in this story of the private world of one of the great iconic figures of the last century.
Amazon.com Review
Pablo Picasso showed a lifelong fascination for monsters, populating countless paintings and drawings with their hideous forms. To judge by his granddaughter Marina's anguished memoir, he might have found their model in the mirror.
In this highly impressionistic account, Marina Picasso writes of life with a man who set impassable boundaries "between the inaccessible demigod and us." And with a vengeance: Picasso terrorized his son, Marina's father, who took refuge in downward-spiraling alcoholism, his ambition crushed. "To make a dove," Picasso once wrote, "you must first wring its neck." The grandchildren fared little better; they provided Picasso only with a little local color, just as women provided him with sexual prey, and in the end everyone in her grandfather's life, Marina writes, wound up as a victim, "sacrificed to his art." Many books have portrayed Pablo Picasso unfavorably, but this is the closest we have to a fly-on-the-wall account of the artist in his cruel prime. The picture isn't pretty, but it is captivating. --Gregory McNamee
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