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- Art<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
25 February, 2019<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_art_prodger_int_1.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\nPicasso once claimed: \u201cI\u2019d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.\u201d It was not, however, something he ever put into practice. He had a period of poverty in the first decade of the 20th century when he was making his name and living and working in rickety circumstances halfway up the butte<\/em> of Montmartre, but his name was quickly made and the money followed. With his pockets full, poverty seemed rather less chic \u2014 especially since he had a penchant for luxurious chattels \u2014 including a chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza limousine, two ch\u00e2teaux, three houses, assorted wives and lovers and, at his death in 1973, the whopping sums of $4.5 million in cash and $1.5 million in gold and stocks.<\/p>\n
If he was rich beyond imagining during his life, his posthumous wealth is of an altogether higher level. Since 1998, the cumulative yearly sales of his work have consistently topped the $100 million mark (indeed since 2004 they have only twice dropped below $200 million), with peaks in 2014 of $445.7 million and in 2015 of $655.2 million. For the best part of 20 years he has been the most valuable artist at auction, with clear blue water between him and Andy Warhol (the next most consistently high performer) and everyone else in the history of art.<\/p>\n
Along the way, he has set various auction records and sold more works in the $100 million-plus band \u2014 the commercial art world\u2019s elite measure \u2014 than any other artist: five to Modigliani\u2019s three and Pollock and De Kooning\u2019s two each. Only last year, his Young Girl with a Flower Basket<\/em>, an unsettling and enigmatic 1905 Rose Period nude from the David and Peggy Rockefeller collection, fetched $115 million. Indeed, while that picture was being auctioned in New York, 16 further paintings dating from 1908 to 1970 appeared at the major spring sales in London, where they collectively raised some \u00a3164 million.<\/p>\n
What is curious about Picasso is that two of the greatest determinants of price \u2014 rarity and a signature style \u2014 don\u2019t apply to him. Picassos arrive on the market in huge numbers, and there are plenty to go round: one estimate puts his lifetime output at some 50,000 works, comprising 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 12,000 drawings, and multiple thousands of prints and innumerable ceramics. And while his work falls into distinct periods \u2014 Blue, Rose, Cubist, classical, etc \u2014 no one style dominates as does, say, a Warhol screenprint of the early 1960s or a Modigliani nude c 1917.<\/p>\n
Among the most expensive of Picasso\u2019s works are one of the 15 variations he painted as a homage to Delacroix, Les Femmes d\u2019Alger <\/em>(\u201cVersion O\u201d<\/em>), made in 1955 and which went in 2015 for a then world record price of $179 million; Le R\u00eave<\/em>, a portrait of his sensually sleeping new lover Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Walter (he was 50, she was 22), painted in 1932 which made $155 million in 2013; and Gar\u00e7on \u00e0 la Pipe<\/em>, a portrait of a garlanded boy smoking against a floral backdrop of 1905 that made $104 million in 2004.<\/p>\n
Picasso\u2019s patron Gertrude Stein once wrote of his work: \u201cThis one was always having something that was coming out . . . that was a solid thing, a charming thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellent thing, a very pretty thing.\u201d She knew, in other words, that there was a Picasso for everyone.<\/p>\n
If his auction life is lively, so too is his exhibition life. Last year saw, as usual, any number of shows \u2014 large and small \u2014 around the world, with Picasso: Blue and Rose<\/em> at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay in Paris and Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy<\/em> at Tate Modern being the most high-profile. Visitor numbers for 2018 have yet to be released but a 2017 exhibition, Pity and Terror: Picasso\u2019s Path to Guernica<\/em> at the Reina Sof\u00eda Gallery in Madrid, attracted a staggering 681,127 viewers.<\/p>\n
\u201cGive me a museum and I\u2019ll fill it,\u201d Picasso once said, and it is clear he wasn\u2019t boasting. There are already four Picasso museums \u2014 in Paris, Antibes, Barcelona and M\u00e1laga \u2014 and Catherine Hutin-Blay, the daughter of the artist\u2019s second wife, Jacqueline Roque, was recently given the go-ahead to open a fifth, in Aix-en-Provence (due in 2021), to show 1,000 of the more than 2,000 Picassos she owns.<\/p>\n
In one of his more reflective moods, Picasso stated: \u201cArt washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.\u201d While fashion undoubtedly plays a part in his appeal, others clearly find that his art washes whiter than most. Many collectors are drawn by a combination of the two. As Jeremiah Evarts, the former head of Sotheby\u2019s New York Impressionist and Modern department, recently put it pragmatically: \u201cYou\u2019re dealing with one of the most recognisable names in art history . . . I can\u2019t imagine an artist I\u2019d rather have my money in than Picasso.\u201d<\/p>\n
Picasso also said: \u201cI begin with an idea, and then it becomes something else.\u201d He meant his art, of course, and regardless of whether his work appeals to you personally, he was one of the most transformative artists of all: an indefatigable dreamer-upper of an endless stream of novel forms in paint, clay and plaster and on paper. He himself became something else too; from just one of a great number of talented figures jostling for space in early 20th-century Paris, he muscled his way to top dog status \u2014 a celebrity, the focal point of debates on modern art and, along the way, an industry that is so robust that it continues to prosper and self-perpetuate nearly 50 years after the appearance of the last work from its CEO\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n
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