Marina Picasso: Picasso: My Grandfather

By GRAHAM REID

We know enough about Pablo Picasso's personal life to accept without hesitation that while he was an artistic genius he was also something of an ogre, a cruel user of people and ideas, self-centred, arrogant, proud and boorish.

He certainly seems to have personified all kinds of unforgivable sins in the eyes of his embittered granddaughter Marina, who late in life has also had the good fortune to inherit around one-quarter of the artist's estate including, ironically, the mansion she was so often shut out of.

Not that that would be much comfort after the horrors he inflicted on her father Paulo (an emotionally weak man who relied on the artist as a benefactor) and his two grandchildren, Marina and her older brother Pablito.

They lived in miserable, impoverished circumstances while everyone thought that, by virtue of their name, they must have been rich.

Marina's father was Picasso's puppet and seemingly didn't have it in him to earn his own living. But according to Marina's account in this jaundiced recollection, the artist would deliberately shun, belittle or humiliate her father, who was his son from his first marriage to Olga Kokhlova, a former Russian ballerina.

The day after Picasso's death, Pablito poisoned himself by drinking bleach. He took months to die painfully.

Eventually Paulo drank himself to death. Marina's own breakdown followed.

It's an exceptionally grim story, but this self-pitying and self-obsessed account of a journey from hell to redemption through therapy (a whopping 14 years of it) very rapidly becomes a litany of complaints that adopts a relentlessly whinging tone.

For example, Marina recalls one time when she went to Picasso's house and his wife Jacqueline let them in: "The electric lock clicks open aggressively - like a reproach."

Now who would have guessed electric locks possessed that much personality?

Once when her brother is at her father's he finishes his Coke in one gulp but has to rush to the toilet to throw up, "not because of the Coke but because of a father who doesn't know how to love".

No one comes out of this distorted book well, other than, perhaps, Pablito. Marina's mother appears as a weak and deluded woman, while her father seems emotionally anorexic and unwilling to stand up to his father.

Paulo's second wife, Christine, commits the sin of being relaxed around Marina and her brother ("probably out of indifference," she snipes).

No incident, however trivial, is untainted in her memory. She dismisses teachers who are kind and helpful: "Later they'll proclaim everywhere, 'I taught history, maths or French to the little Picasso kids'. No doubt one of the greatest academic distinctions."

Compassion, forgiveness, sympathy and gratitude seem to have come late in Marina's life, which makes this slender account an increasingly tedious book.

She eventually made her peace with her late grandfather and herself, and found solace and purpose in good works by establishing orphanages in Vietnam - and by flogging perfume under the famous imprint, which seems a family trait she shares with Paloma.

But by then, and only in the last few pages of this relentlessly grim book, you get a brief sense of her as woman rather than a miserable child of a dysfunctional family.

This is writing as therapy, and interesting though it is - certainly the stuff of malicious salon gossip - I felt the need to have a long shower afterwards. And not just because it was Pablo Picasso who had so few redeeming features.

* Graham Reid is a Herald feature writer.

* Chatto & Windus, $45.00