Color Starvation

Aesthetics, Collecting

Question: I am looking for a more colorful piece than the prints you show. Do you have any? -GH Response: There are very few Picasso prints that are both colored and great and none that we presently own.  I wouldn’t need all the fingers of one hand to count the truly great ones.  Almost without exception, Picasso’s greatest prints are black-and-white, as is widely acknowledged.  Only one multicolored print enters most sophisticated collectors’ top 10 list.  And most colors fade, so that today, 50 years or more after their printing, most of the available colored prints have faded to one degree or another.  Add to that the realization that color increases cost dramatically, and one is often led to the […]

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Picasso Print Breaks the $5 Million Barrier

Collecting, Picasso and Printmaking / 1 Comment

  I guess it paid off to stick it in their evening sale.  Yes, folks, last night’s La femme qui pleure, I at Christie’s NY went for $5,122,500, thereby setting the world’s record for a print by any artist.  It also more than doubled the previous record for a Picasso print at auction, an unsigned impression of La Minotauromachie at just under $2M last year in London.  Wait just a minute—I have to stop and catch my breath….

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Birthday Greetings

General

Tête couronnée (Crowned Head) Yesterday  marked Picasso’s 130th birthday.  Hard to imagine that the quintessentially modern artist lived so long ago!  Included in our collection is a Blue Period drawing that is shockingly over a century old—a veritable antique.  Happy birthday, Pablo!

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Wuzzon da Block?

Collecting

There are some nice offerings at the fall auctions in NY, but before we get to the paintings, it is noteworthy that for the first time, at least of which I’m aware, prints have made one of the storied evening sales.  Both their low estimates exceed the million $ barrier, and both are at Christie’s, consisting of an unsigned Minotauromachie and a signed impression of  La Femme qui Pleure, I (Bl.1333), the final (7th) state: What’s even more remarkable, it seems to me, is the unusually large number of really nice paintings, eleven in the Christie’s evening sale alone. At Sotheby’s, there’s the fascinating 1927 Guitare accroché au mur: and the huge late Picasso painting, one of the nicer ones,

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Picasso Orphans

General

Deux vieux lisant une lettre, 1962  Earlier today, while shelving some recent auction catalogues, I started leafing through one of them to the dog-eared pages which marked the Picassos, when a wonderful drawing hit me again.   Now don’t call me a grumpy old man, but I find it surprising when every now and then a great work falls through the cracks and the art market doesn’t notice.  Take these two old men.  Sure, this is not a drawing of a woman, much less a naked woman,  and it doesn’t have a drop of color.  It’s not large (but at 35 cm, not that small either) and it’s not an oil, just a lowly pencil and paper.   But the above

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Jerry Won!

General

The “Ledor Gallery Race Car”, courtesy of driver/owner Jerry Kroll, propelled by dachshund power, just won the 2011 Sports Club of America (SCCA) Championship for Formula Enterprise.  Go Jerry!  

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The Measure of the Man: Introduction to the de Young Picasso Exhibit

General

  It is impossible to fully appreciate the breadth and depth of Picasso’s art without pouring through his catalogues raisonnés (the tomes that illustrate all of his known artworks).  Visiting the Picasso Museum in Paris is as close as one can come to achieving this goal by looking at the actual art.  The traveling loan from that museum at the de Young includes many masterpieces but is still a very small sample of his work.  It’s about as representative as 150 of his artworks could be, but he created so many varied styles and subjects that they couldn’t be included in any depth, or some of them included at all, in a show of this size.  The exemplars of the Blue

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Picasso in Exile

General

Why bother visiting Paris, you might ask, as long as the Picasso Museum remains closed?  Good question.  But my family and I decided to go anyway, unwilling to wait another year.  Our Picasso treasure hunt therefore required a little extra work, since you couldn’t very well go to just one place and be greeted by Picasso’s many persons and things.  Our first Picasso sighting was just a fortunate accident–while strolling near our flat, my wife Casey spotted this wonderful, if bird-stained, bronze of Dora Maar (Tête de femme, aka Monument à Guillaume Apollinaire) in a small garden in the shadow of the gothic Church of St. Germain des Prés (located at its eponymous square).  This wartime sculpture (1941) was chosen by committee to

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Scam, or Not? You be the judge….

General / 1 Comment

To add to the ever-increasing list of art scams comes this story, which distinguishes itself with its novel, dramatic flair.  I should say “possible” art scams, since this one remains unproved.  As you know, usually I write only about Picasso, but this tale seemed so unusual that it grabbed my attention.  How about I lay bare the story and you could be the judge? About a month ago, on a fine spring morning, two friends of mine, a well-heeled Bay Area couple on a jaunt to NY, stumbled into a Chelsea gallery, where an installation of works on paper by a Japanese artist was being hung.  They fell in love with two of the artworks, each measuring around 2 x

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WHAT’S NOT THERE

General

The Picasso Museum on wheels, currently at the de Young in San Francisco, is such a wonderful show (see “Picasso by the Bay” below) that it’s almost easier to discuss what’s not there than what is.  Well not quite, though each great Picasso, in addition to being loved and understood on its own merits, must be seen in the context of his entire oeuvre for full appreciation, given the added dimensions that the context inevitably provides.  I won’t again trot out the by now overused Picasso-ism about the movement of his thought interesting him (in his later years) more than the thought itself–there, I said it anyway. But nowhere is that movement better preserved, with the exception of the successive

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