There's no running away from Picasso

Picasso, My Grandfather
by Marina Picasso

The private life and public demons of Pablo Picasso have fueled numerous biographies and films-but this is the first memoir from a family member descended from the iconic painter's first marriage. Picasso's granddaughter Marina witnessed firsthand the humiliation and destruction of her father Paolo, Picasso's son, and the suicide of her brother Pablito. By the time her grandfather died, Marina was filled with such anger that she tried to refuse her share of the inheritance-to free herself of the Picasso legacy. Her story is passionate, painful, and powerful: an unsparing, unflinching account of the brilliant man who once said "to make a dove, you must first wring its neck."

Chapter 1

There's no running away from Picasso. I know. I never succeeded. But when everything caved in, it still hadn't hit me.

It's one o'clock in the afternoon. I'm in Geneva, driving down the quai Gustave-Ador in a steady flow of traffic, taking my children, Gaël and Flore, to school. On my right is Lake Geneva and its famous geyser, the Jet d'Eau. The lake, the car, the Jet d'Eau-and suddenly I'm in the grip of a violent panic attack. My fingers contract in an unbearable cramp. I feel a burning spasm in my chest. My heart is pounding. I'm suffocating. I'm going to die. I have just enough time to tell the children to stay calm before I collapse with my head on the steering wheel. I'm paralyzed. Am I going crazy?

I stop in the middle of the road. Cars speed by, almost grazing mine, and honk at me to move on. No one stops.

After half an hour of anguish and fear, I manage to restart the car, park it on the shoulder of the road and drag myself over to the gasoline station a few yards away. I must call for help. I don't want to be put away. What would happen to my children?

"You need to undergo analysis," my physician says to me. At this point I have nothing to lose. And so I began my analysis-an analysis that will last fourteen years.

Fourteen years of uncontrollable tears, blackouts and screams. I writhe in pain as I inch my way back in time, reliving the things that had destroyed me; silent, then stammering, then finally expressing all the things that had been buried deep within the little girl and adolescent and had eaten her alive. It takes fourteen years of misery to rectify so many years of misfortune. All because of Picasso.

* * *

Picasso's quest for the absolute entailed an implacable will to power. His brilliant oeuvre demanded human sacrifices. He drove everyone who got near him to despair and engulfed them. No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius. He needed blood to sign each of his paintings: my father's blood, my brother's, my mother's, my grandmother's, and mine. He needed the blood of all those who loved him-people who thought they loved a human being, whereas they really loved Picasso.

My father was born under the yoke of Picasso's tyranny, and he died from it-betrayed, disappointed, demeaned, destroyed, inexorably.

My brother Pablito, the plaything of my grandfather's sadism and indifference, committed suicide at age twenty-four by drinking a lethal dose of bleach. I found him lying in his own blood, his esophagus and larynx burned, his stomach wrecked, his heart adrift. I held his hand at La Fontonne Hospital in Antibes as he lay slowly dying. With this horrendous act he wanted to put an end to suffering and neutralize the dangers awaiting him-dangers that awaited me too, for we were the stillborn descendants of Picasso, trapped in a spiral of mocked hopes.

My grandmother Olga, humiliated, sullied, degraded by so many betrayals, ended her life paralyzed. Not once did my grandfather come to see her when she was bedridden and in distress. Yet she had given up everything for him-her country, her career, her dreams and her pride.

As for my mother, she wore the name Picasso like a badge, a badge that lifted her to the highest rungs of paranoia. In marrying my father she had married Picasso. In her delirious moments, she couldn't accept the fact that he didn't want to welcome her or give her the "grand" life she deserved. Fragile, lost and unbalanced, she had to make do with part of a meager weekly allowance, which my grandfather paid to keep his son and grandchildren under his domination and on the verge of poverty.

I wish that one day I could live without this past.

* * *

November 1956. It's a Thursday, and my father is leading me by the hand. He walks silently to the gate looming before us, which protects La Californie, my grandfather's house in Cannes. My brother Pablito is trailing us, hands clasped behind his back. I've just turned six, and Pablito is seven.

My father rings the bell on the metal gate. I'm afraid, as I am each time we come. We hear the sound of footsteps, then a key turning in the lock. La Californie's caretaker, an elderly Italian worn by age and servitude, appears behind the half-open gate. He looks us over and asks my father: "Monsieur Paul, do you have an appointment?"

"Yes," my father stammers. He has let go of my hand so I won't feel how moist his palm is.

"Good," the elderly caretaker replies, "I'll go see if the master can see you." The portal closes behind him. It's raining. The scent of eucalyptus hangs in the air, from the trees with peeling bark that line the path where we are left to wait for the master's orders. Just like last Saturday, or the previous Thursday.

In the distance a dog is barking. It's bound to be Lump, my grandfather's dachshund. He likes Pablito and me. He lets us pet him. We wait endlessly. Pablito is now clinging to me both to comfort me and to feel less lonely himself. My father has finished his cigarette. He puts it out and lights another one. His fingers are stained with nicotine.

"You'd better wait in the car," he whispers as though he were afraid that someone could hear him.

"No," we answer in chorus. "We're staying with you."

Our hair is matted from the rain. We feel guilty.

Once again the key turns in the gate and the wrinkled Italian appears. He lowers his eyes. In a discouraged voice, he recites the lesson he has memorized. "The master can't see you today. Madame Jacqueline asked me to tell you that he's working."

Even the concierge is not fooled. He's ashamed.

* * *

How many Thursdays have we heard those words-"The master is working," "The master is sleeping," or "The master is not here"-at the locked gate of La Californie, defended like a fortress. Occasionally, it is Jacqueline Roque, the future, devoted Madame Picasso, who delivers the sentence: "The Sun doesn't want to be disturbed."

When she doesn't refer to him as "the Sun," it is "Monseigneur" or the "Grand Maître." We don't dare show our feelings of disappointment and humiliation in front of her.

On the days when the portal is opened for us, we follow my father across the graveled courtyard up to the entrance of the house. I count each footstep like so many prayers offered on the beads of a rosary. They come to exactly sixty hesitant, guilty steps.

Copyright © October 2001, Riverhead books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Marina Picasso is the granddaughter of Pablo Picasso. She lives in the house she inherited from her grandfather.