Seems like decades-dead Marie-Thérèse Walter is still the art world’s it girl, still raking in the most auction moneys for the similarly long-dead Picasso. This colorfully suggestive paint-ditty is estimated to fetch in $15-$20 million at Sotheby’s. The mistress is seen here snoozing, probably after all that “intimidating and terrible” sex Pablo was giving her in the cabana. Read more »
9 out of 10 of the top selling artists of 2010 are dead, as per this nifty tally of the art market’s rebound. Pablo Picasso “made” the most with a $405,708,629 grand total, fattened by that fug, record-setting mistress painting for $106.5 million. Read more »
Oh, looky here. A secret stash of 271 unseen, undocumented, authentic Picasso paintings and cubic doodles just “turned up” in a garage of Picasso’s former electrician and his wife. They say the loot was “a gift;” they “aren’t thieves,” they “didn’t do anything wrong…” except keep 60 million dollars worth of art in a trunk for a couple of decades, shhh. Read more »
Turns out that the prosecutor’s office vastly overestimated the value of the five paintings stolen from the Paris Museum of Modern Art. They’re worth $114-127 million, not $613 million. The heist wasn’t the reported cinematic feat of sophistication either: The museum’s alarm system has been malfunctioning since March and all the thief had to do was “smash a pane of glass and climb in through a window.”
Last night, a crafty super-thief lifted a record-large loot of museum art with an estimated worth of $600 million. UPDATE: NOT! CCTV captured a “heavily disguised, burly figure” leaping through a broken window of the Paris Museum of Modern Art. Read more »
Yesterday Christie’s set the auction record by selling a Picasso for $106.5 million to an anonymous bidder, breaking Sotheby’s record for a $104.3 mill Giacometti. The reclining Coco-esque blond in “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” is his young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, so that’s twisted, post-coital smugness you’re looking at. She also looked like this, before he knocked her up and exchanged her for a fresher assortment of mistresses/wives/furniturized female forms. There’s not much to this painting aside from its assigned value, really, and the artistic process may have sounded something like this: “Want to be part of art history? Ok, lie down next to this curtain.” |NYT|
“Erotic Scene,” “La Douler,” “The Pain” or, as Gawker commenters call it, PaBLOW Picasso’s BLEW Period painting will be displayed at the Met along with all the rest of their 300+ Picassos. Apparently, the controversy wasn’t about the work’s authenticity or “think of the children!” getting an eyeful of fellatio, but, according to Met curator Gary Tinterow, the museum hesitated including the work in the upcoming exhibition because “it’s not very good.” The painterly dirty doodle was a joke between friends, painted in “1902 or 1903 in Paris or Barcelona” at Picasso’s “poorest.” About the so called X-rated painting, Picasso has written: “I’ve done worse.” Does that mean someone, somewhere may have a stockpile of Picasso porn and isn’t sharing?
Christie’s highest European pre-auction estimate is $45-$60 million for Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period portrait of party-boy artist Angel Fernandez de Soto visiting the Green Fairy. Disputed as Nazi loot, the 1903 Picasso brings up the subject of absinthe at Washington Post.
Absinthe is “falsely subversive” and “uncool” as of 2009 according to NYT (along with lower back tattoos and Interpol). The olde-turned-new trend has passed, friends (Mansinthe, anyone?). Read more »
Hailed as one the greatest painters of our time, works by Pablo Picasso typically sell for tens and hundreds of millions, unless that is, they’re damaged by clumsy people. A woman who accidentally fell into one of the the famed artist’s paintings at the Met, putting a 6-inch tear in it, just reduced its value by half according to a “top appraiser” quoted in the Post. Now it’s only worth a measly $65 mill! |NYP|
Last night, a red notebook with 33 pencil drawings by Pablo Picasso was stolen from the artist’s eponymous museum in Paris. Without any signs of break-in or alarm, the $11 million sketchbook was taken from an unlocked case conveniently located in a room without surveillance. |AP|
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