He’s back!  Four years and one lawsuit later, the angel has descended again.  This portrait is, I’m convinced, the best Blue Period painting not yet in a museum, and one of the best of all.   If I had a cool hundred mil to blow, I would have held my fire when the Marie-Therese was [...]

I’m often asked about my opinion of art as investment.  My opinion, whatever it is, is presumably clouded by my love for Picasso.  Better to direct such inquiries to the Mei Moses® Fine Art Index  (artasanasset.com), a statistical database and analysis compiled by two NYU economists.  Quite sensibly, they limit their statistics only to auctioned [...]

Hani Shihada, Madison Avenue, April 28, 2010
It’s springtime in New York, and Picassos, like bulbs, are flowering everywhere.  It was truly a pleasure to soak them in at the museums, the auctions, and also at Marlborough Gallery, which had staged an impressive print exhibit, including the masterpieces from the Nelson Blitz and Catherine Woodard collection.   [...]

Femme au chapeau, @ 1955
This lovely Picasso is courtesy of a Picasso lover and aspiring collector, who writes, “Just to give you a bit more background from my end, my wife is a sculptor and we obviously have a shared interest in art. I’ve become fascinated by Picasso over the years, and owning a print [...]

Looks like we won’t have a chance to see the blockbuster Gagosian show.  By now I’ve however looked through the catalogue a couple of times and am deeply impressed by the assortment of wonderful paintings he amassed for it. (I’m not so big on late Picasso prints, with a few notable exceptions.)  John Richardson’s essay [...]

Our fifth anniversary in the business of selling Picassos came and went without much fanfare. In fact, it occurs to me that I don’t know exactly when it is. Sometime around April, I suppose—let’s call it April 1. The uncertainty about the date is attributable to having started this business without an [...]

A final note about the recent Minotauromachie conference. Or rather about the Q & A which followed, in which one lugubrious chap posed the question, rhetorical no doubt, to the distinguished panelists: what would Picasso have thought about Iraq? At the time I confess to having been a bit annoyed by the [...]

It has both a good and bad week for art crime in the news.  The bad news is the heist of a number of Picassos from his granddaughter Diana’s home, two paintings of which (shown below) have been valued together at $66 million.

On the bright side is the following article that AP ran on March [...]

The 25th of this month marks Picasso’s 125th birthday. Although Picasso’s work was largely inspired by his famously extreme joie de vivre, his long life [...]

Are you aware of the wonderful quote attributed to Picasso when, in the 60’s or 70’s there was a sudden diminution of prices at auction of his (and others’) works, he was asked what he thought of the loss of value.  He is alleged to have said (although I don’t recall the exact [...]