Aesthetics

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

What is it with the art market’s color fixation?  Yes, I know, every room needs a bit of color.  But does that justify throwing good money after bad colorful art?  And in a down market, no less.  Take the following small (34.9 x 27.9 cm, 13 ¾ x 11”) watercolor, the 1906 Coupe, cruche et boîte à lait: The Sotheby’s auction catalogue described it as “a seminal expression of the artist’s genius.”  I think it’s more like The Emperor’s New Clothes. Though the auction cataloguer did not allude to this, one could place this still life in the context of Picasso’s explorations in his Cezannian proto-cubist phase. But even if so, it is only of academic interest.  It is not

Now that everyone else has opined about the last auction round, having waited my turn, I can now get in the last word. The art world seems rather pleased with itself in view of the continued price escalation, with no end in sight. Yet the intelligence of the market is still underappreciated. It’s time, it seems to me, that buyers be given their due. And of course I’m just talking about buyers of Picassos, since those are the only works I study in depth. Commentary about the intelligence of the art market in general has not been quite so favorable. For example, note the opening line of Souren Melikian’s essay: “The May sales demonstrated how unpredictable buying patterns have become.

Yesterday Casey and I attended a half-day symposium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art about its current exhibition, “Picasso’s Greatest Print: The Minotauromachy in All Its States”. The exhibit was small but choice: it included an impression of each of the seven states of this wonderful etching, all but the final state of which are exceedingly rare (there are but two of each in existence) plus one of the two hand-colored proofs of the final state. The collection comes from an anonymous private collection on long-term loan to the Paris Musée Picasso, supplementing the museum’s collection of the other known impression of six of the seven states and of its colored proof. The exhibit was nice of course,