Marseille, France:Â Â Since Marina Picasso was a child, living on the edge of poverty and loitering at the gates of a French villa with her father to plead for an allowance from her grandfather, Pablo Picasso, she has struggled with the burden of that artist’s towering legacy.
When she was in her 20s when she inherited the 19th-century villa, La Californie, as well as a vast trove of Picasso’s art treasure, she turned the paintings to face the walls in offense.
Through 15 years of therapy, she dissected bitter family memories of her grandfather’s perceived indifference and her brother’s suicide. In her 2001 memoir, “Picasso: My Grandfather,” she bared her pain and anger at the Picasso clan.
Now 64, Picasso acknowledges that she is expanding her rebellion by preparing to sell off many of his artworks for finance and for charity – aid for a pediatric hospital in Vietnam and projects in France and Switzerland benefiting the elderly and troubled teenagers.
And her unusual sales approach is reverberating through international art markets, worried dealers and auctioneers familiar to playing key – and profitable – roles in the sale of renowned art.
Picasso said she would sell works privately and would judge ‘one by one, based on need,’ how many, and which, of the remaining Picasso works, of about 10,000 that she inherited, she would put up for sale.
Picasso has been regularly selling her grandfather’s works for years to support herself and her charities. And since the death of her longtime dealer in 2008, she has tried various strategies in the market – auctioning two major paintings in 2013 and displaying a collection of nude drawings by her grandfather at Sotheby’s in Paris last year.
But her decision to sell them on her own suggests a more aggressive effort to purge herself of her legacy. And while other Picasso heirs have occasionally sold works, Marina Picasso is the only one who seems to be ‘accelerating’ the sale of art objects, said Enrique Mallen, an art professor said.
“It’s better for me to sell my works and preserve the money to redistribute to humanitarian causes,” Picasso said, speaking publicly about her new strategy for the first time while inspecting a hospital site in Marseille, where she is financing a psychiatric unit for teenagers in crisis.
Marina Picasso, who inherited about 300 paintings among those 10,000 Picasso artworks – ceramics, drawings, etchings and sculptures are among the others – said she had not decided on the number to be sold and had no plan to put the villa on the market. But she knows which piece she will sell first: “La Famille,” a 1935 portrait of a family surrounded by an arid landscape.
“It’s symbolic because I was born in a great family, but it was a family that was not a family,” Picasso said.
Her timing is good: Last year, auction sales of Picassos were second only to those of Andy Warhol – $449 million last year in a $16.1 billion international market, according to Art net, the New York-based art researcher.
While the sales will broaden Picasso’s philanthropy, they will also help her move on from the burden of her family history, she said.
(With Inputs from The New York Times)