Picasso: My Grandfather - Hardcover

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