The great Picasso sell-off: heir to 10,000
works ready to offload grandfather’s art
Marina Picasso’s plan to bypass traditional sales routes sends shockwaves through art world
Marina Picasso poses with Palette et Tête de Taureau. She has expressed disappointment that the
work fetched £1.4m at auction two years ago. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Mark Brown, arts correspondent
Friday 6 February 2015 11.31 EST
The granddaughter of Pablo Picasso has said she plans to privately sell off “one by one, based on
need” some of her collection of more than 10,000 works by the artist to help fund her charity
work.
Marina Picasso’s plans to bypass traditional art market routes will send shivers down the spines
of dealers and auction houses, though how much of an impact it will truly have on the art market
depends on a key question. How much of her enormous collection – which includes 300
paintings along with thousands of drawings, etchings, and ceramics – does she intend to sell?
Rumours emerged a month ago that Marina was aiming to sell seven important paintings which
could be worth up to £200m. It was also reported that she was planning to sell her grandfather’s
Cannes villa La Californie, where she lives.
Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. Photograph: Getty Images
This week Marina broke her silence to deny the sale of La Californie, but confirm she would to
sell some works.
Melanie Gerlis, art market editor of The Art Newspaper and author of the book Art as an
Investment, said it was interesting that Picasso was choosing to bypass dealers and auction
houses.
“Is she crazy? Probably not,” Gerlis said. “She obviously is great provenance and she must know
a lot of people. The reality is that there are a lot of ways to sell art. We are used to auction versus
dealer but now you have auctions acting as dealers, you have agents, you have advisers, people
are even selling things over Instagram. It is a changing landscape. If she was selling 300
paintings all at the same time then yes that may depress the market. It doesn’t sound to me like it
is going to be a dramatic fire sale.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Marina confirmed that she was selling some works in
order to benefit her charity work. “It’s better for me to sell my works and preserve the money to
redistribute to humanitarian causes. I have paintings, of course, that I can use to support these
projects.” She said she had not decided how many she would sell.
However, Marina does know which piece she is going to dispose of first – it will be a 1935 work
called La Famille which depicts a family in an arid landscape. “It’s symbolic because I was born
in a great family, but it was a family that was not a family,” she said.
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Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto, which was bought by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber in
1995 for £18m. Photograph: Reuters
That is possibly an understatement of her true feelings. In her 2001 memoir, Picasso: My
Grandfather, she describes a man who was “incapable of love”. How her father died two years
after the artist under the “yoke of his tyranny … betrayed, disappointed, demeaned. Destroyed.”
And the tragedy of her brother, Pablito, “the plaything of Picasso’s sadism and indifference”,
who later killed himself.
She also wrote disparagingly of the people who granted him power and “raised him to the level
of God: the experts, art historians, curators, critics, not to mention courtiers, parasites,
bootlickers”.
Marina ended up inheriting La Californie and an enormous hoard of art but she has spent 14
years in therapy. “People say I should appreciate my inheritance, and I do, but it is an inheritance
without love,” she said.
For many years, Marina was selling her grandfather’s work guided by the Swiss art dealer Jan
Krugier, who died in 2008.
People say I should appreciate my inheritance, and I do, but it is an inheritance without love
Two years ago, she auctioned two important paintings at Sotheby’s in Paris and admitted
disappointment at the result with Femme Assise en Robe Grise selling for £3.2m – a 1943
painting of his muse Dora Maar and Palette et Tête de Taureau (1938) selling for £1.4m. Marina
said she expected more because buyers knew the money was going to charity.
That seems to be the reason for the decision to sell privately.
Patrick Legant, a London-based independent art consultant who worked at Sotheby’s for 10
years, said the absence of the “legendary” Krugier may be another.
He doubted that, logistically, she would be able to privately sell the works in great numbers:
“How many can one person sell? If she were really to do it by herself, it is a huge task. I would
not be too worried.”
More realistic would be selling one or two pictures a year, “and that is a long way from flooding
the market. I find it interesting that people might be surprised that someone who has pictures
might sell them herself. I’m sure a lot of pictures are sold, not through a dealer or an auction
house, but because they know people who might be interested and I’m sure she knows a lot of
people who have the means to buy a Picasso,” he said.
What is certainly true is that the sales could generate huge amounts of money for her charities in
Vietnam – from where Marina adopted three of her five children – France and Switzerland.
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Marina Picasso with her grandfather. Rumours emerged a month ago that she was planning to
sell seven key paintings. Photograph: Rex
“The Picasso market is still very strong, there is such an international demand …he is one of the
painters of the 20th century,” Legant said. Also to have that provenance, to come directly from a
member of the family – “it is an absolutely amazing provenance”.
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Gerlis agreed. “Picasso is anyone’s guess in this market but it is Picasso, it is her.” It may also
be, Gerlis added, that if sales are made privately, we may never get to hear what has changed
hands. In addition, only Marina knows precisely what she has. According to the authoritative
Online Picasso Project created by Enrique Mallen, an art history professor at Sam Houston State
University in Texas, there are 706 catalogued works in the Marina Picasso Collection from
teenage drawings to paint palettes from the year if his death in 1973. It lists some significant
paintings such as a 1923 portrait of Picasso’s first wife, Olga Khokhlova.
Gerlis said more generally the art market was positively glowing. “There seem to be more people
wanting to buy and sell art. I don’t think auctions and dealers are going to say this [Picasso sale]
is a disaster, it won’t take a ton of business away from them, they may see it as just a shame.”