Spanish Lessons

General / 6 Comments

I love Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s art critic—he has such a good way with words. It’s the substance of his essays I have a problem with. I first lost faith in him as a Picasso critic in his review of the MOMA’s Matisse-Picasso show, when he eenie-meenie-mynie-mo’ed which painting was the best in show until he settled upon Matisse’s The Piano Lesson, because it “falls entirely outside Picasso’s range.” Sorry, but nothing Matisse ever did was beyond the range of the creator of a hundred styles. Now Schjeldahl takes some more potshots at the maestro in his review of the current Picasso show in Madrid (“Spanish Lessons”, June 19, 2006), which shows Picasso side-by-side with some of the Old […]

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A Tough Audience (A Slight Review of the Current Art Market)

Collecting

This morning I delivered a lecture to the toughest audience I’ve ever encountered: enthusiastic, true, but with a 30 second attention span and constant hand-raising, which when called upon led to shaggy-dog stories with no question at the end. The topic was Picasso, and I found myself wondering how to best reach this know-it-all group of four- and five-year-olds from my daughter’s preschool. We focused primarily on a colorful cubist gouache because it allows many interpretations, and wouldn’t you know it that they came up with quite a number of them. Among the things I told them, they particularly liked the famous Picasso line I had trotted out for the occasion, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael,

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A Gumshoe on Costco’s Tail

Art Fraud

The NY Times today ran an update to the fake Picassos at Costco caper (note my earlier blog dated March 16, 2006, for the full story), which reported that the third and final Picasso which Costco had put up for sale (it sold two and withdrew one) was also deemed a fake by Maya Picasso. Today’s story contained the following hilarious footnote about Jim Tutwiler, the art dealer who had supplied Costco with the fakes: “Mr. Tutwiler refused to comment about Dr. Zhang’s drawing, saying he had been asked by Costco not to speak about the issue. But he did say that he had hired a private detective to investigate Ms. Widmaier-Picasso. In an e-mail message to Dr. Zhang in

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Blind Faith

The Collecting Instinct / 2 Comments

Last week I heard the funniest story that I just have to blog. (Names have been omitted to protect the guilty.) A reputable dealer in Chicago told me that he sold a painting to a blind man. The blind man is a collector who had bought art from him for many years. He would typically ask the dealer to find him one sort of work of art or another, and the dealer always obliged. Later in life he lost his vision. No matter, one day he approached the dealer and asked for a Dufy painting. The dealer found a nice small one and presented it to the blind man. The blind man asks, “Tell me, is it nice?” The dealer

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Mouse Stew

Aesthetics, Collecting, Picasso and Printmaking / 1 Comment

I’ve got a bad habit of going way out on a limb in advising my current and prospective clients what art to buy and what to avoid. It’s a time-consuming process, yet I only occasionally succeed in my efforts to alter anyone’s tastes or collecting proclivities. And lately I’ve begun questioning whether or not I should even bother, given the low likelihood of success and the high likelihood of (unintentionally) offending. The following is a classic example of how such a line of reasoning crashed and burned. It regards a discussion I fell into about a couple of prints a collector had purchased years ago from Picasso’s illustrated book La Tauromaquia (1959, Bloch 950-976). I have a strong distaste for

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eVite to Blog

eVite to Blog

We invite you to share your thoughts and pose any questions about Picasso, his art, or the art market in general. Please note that we moderate your correspondence for suitability and edit it for readability. Regrettably, we also must conceal the specific identities of those persons or entities which may be cast in a negative light in these posts.

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Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading

1. Pablo Picasso: Catalogs of the Printed Graphic Work, Volume One: 1904-1967 by Georges Bloch is the single most often referenced volume of Picasso’s various print catalogue raisonnés. Despite thumbnail pictures, it catalogues 64 years of Picasso’s printmaking career, all but the last four years, and thus provides a wonderful overview of his art in a single, handy volume.  Alan Wofsy of San Francisco is the current publisher of the original French version, available at http://www.art-books.com/cgi-bin/artbooks/467-2.html.  At the time of this writing (which I am now updating as of 2015), there is as yet no English version.  But Bloch is mostly a picture book with little verbiage anyway, and the French is not hard to conquer. 2. PICASSO: THE REAL FAMILY STORY, by Olivier Widmaier Picasso,

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Artist’s Proofs

Picasso and Printmaking, Technical Matters

Question: Can you tell me something about the fact that [the print in which I’m interested] is one of the artist’s proofs? Does that mean that because it isn’t numbered it is of less value than the rest of the edition? -Judith C. Response: Most of Picasso’s prints were released in editions of 50, with a small number (usually 5 to 20) artist’s proofs. An edition of 50 would be numbered 1/50 to 50/50 by a hand other than Picasso’s. Whereas the artist’s proofs bore no numbers, they were usually inscribed with the words “epreuve d’artiste”, also by another hand. There are certainly no hard and fast rules about the relative value of artist’s proofs. Some dealers will accord a

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The Determinants of the Relative Value of Prints

Collecting, Picasso and Printmaking

Question: Maybe you can help me understand why one print could be $95k and another could be $2k—is it all rarity? —Luke P. Response: Supply certainly influences demand, but it is not the only factor. A print’s price is also determined by the demand for that particular print, the richness of the impression (of the inked plate, block, or stone on the paper), the condition of the print, the size of the print, its colorfulness, and the presence of a signature. The demand for a given print is largely determined by the quality of the design, but is also subject to other prevailing preferences in the marketplace. For example, in Picasso prints, female portraiture generally commands a higher price than

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