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 opening or any other inaugural event, which I suppose one would more likely encounter in a storefront gallery than a private dealership such as ours. Rather, somewhere around this time five years ago, we simply set about building on our twenty-year-old collection by acquiring the best Picassos we could find in our budget, established a presence on the web, and started developing our reputation, one click at a time.

To mark our anniversary, I thought I’d take a moment to share some current thoughts on the subject of how our collecting has evolved. Increasingly the focus of our acquisitions has been the very top-notch, crème de la crème, 10/10, premium, museum quality (but museums, pack rats that they are, will take anything, come to think of it!), dramatic, sensational masterpieces. As such, I must report that it is very difficult, and ever increasingly so, to find works for sale on the market today of this caliber and in our price range and at reasonable prices. It’s therefore taken quite a while to assemble our small assortment of paintings, drawings, and prints. At times, I’ve even had to resort to the sin of paying a premium just to get the best available work. That’s the way it goes….

Some of the prints we have bought reflected my earlier effort to get the very best for the price level, and include some of the lowest price levels because of the idealistic notion of updating President Hoover’s platform of “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” with the added goal of “a Picasso on every wall”. Most of those have sold, and I have no present plans to replace them. Today, I tend to buy fewer but pricier pieces, aiming for the biggest  blockbuster (read quality, not size) within our shooting range. With our extensive network of contacts, I have the ability, however, to source Picassos of all media and in all price ranges for our clients, so one needn’t be shy in expressing a desire for works that do not appear on our catalogue page.

Despite having set our sites on the crème de la crème, that is not to say that I’m unwilling to bend this standard in favor of a particular client’s taste, at the client’s insistence of course. But when I’m shopping for us, I don’t do much bending. Perhaps not every piece we buy would be considered a “masterpiece” in the conventional sense, but when I look at its particular place in its own genre, such as, for example, the Contrée etching (Bloch 362; http://ledorfineart.com/B362_contree.html ), each work is at the top. Further on this example, though I concede that the Contrée is not for everybody (at least it doesn’t seem to be since it’s not a commercially popular work), I wager that if one were to take the time to really look at it, there’s a good chance one would emerge with as superlative a view of it as ours.

Most of all, I’d like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to you. Thanks for working with us. Without you, in words Sandra Bernhardt has made famous, we’re nothing! We appreciate the business, and I love the site feedback and the exchange of scholarship and opinion. Here’s to the next five years! I’d say fifty, but that would presuppose the next generation going into the family biz. That would be OK, but only after they complete medical school. -Kobi

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No bird
Birdless
Bird on the brain
Birdbrain

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I just have to write this. Amid typically stratospheric prices for good Picassos, someone just walked away with a real steal (that is, if you can call anything denominated in the millions a steal):

Picasso’s great neoclassical/sculptural painting, Baigneur et baigneuses (1920-21) just sold at Sotheby’s London, near its low estimate, for $5.8M. Not only that, but it had been bought in at a pre-auction estimate of $8-12M at Sotheby’s NY in 2004. I failed to see why it didn’t exceed expectations back in 2004, not to mention this time around. To my mind it is one of the nicest and most important oils of its genre still in circulation. If it looks familiar to you but you were not at either Sotheby’s showroom, perhaps you saw it in the recent traveling exhibit “Picasso and American Art”, which graced the Whitney, the San Francisco MOMA and the Walker in Minneapolis. (Note that the colors in this photo are muted, much less vibrant and blue than the actual painting.)

The painting that turned out not to be quite the steal I had expected was the following late Picasso, titled Tête d’homme (1968):

This lovely, largish (73 cm) portrait of a musketeer had a low pre-auction estimate, only in part due to repairs that it had withstood, repairs which were however indiscernible to the naked eye and therefore didn’t at all detract from the force and beauty of this masterful portrait. The low estimate, including buyer’s premium, was around a million US bucks, which really would have been a steal. Very little interest had been expressed in it prior to the auction, but it nonetheless went for around $1.7M, not quite the steal I had hoped for, but still not much for this handsome jaw-dropper. Not much at all, considering that these late Picassos have been selling for up to 10 times that and are no nicer (if at times up to twice the size).  It was certainly far nicer than the two homely musketeers sold down the street the very next evening for around $2 and 2.5 million, respectively (lots 75 and 77).

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And now, for a few words about finding works for you by other artists or, for that matter, works by Picasso that we don’t already own.  I hope this doesn’t come across as condescending and that you’re still smiling by the end, but, listen up, people!  OK, I’ll cop to the charge of paternalism if you wish to invoke it when you find me trying to make sure that you exercise the best possible taste and judgment when acquiring art.  Why do I bother?  It’s risky, after all.  Unsolicited advice may not be welcome, especially if it’s critical. To date, it seems that all of its recipients have been grateful, though some have heedlessly gone on to do exactly what they had intended in the first place.  Which is OK, of course.

I bother, because of what happens when I turn you loose in the shopping mall! I’ll give you but the latest example to illustrate.  A client couple, good clients who have since become friends, when we first met (online) had initially expressed interest in our synthetic cubist gouache.  They passed on it because of price and instead bought some other works from us (an aquatint and an etching) that were more in line with their budget.  But the man still fancies cubism.  Recently, when catching up by phone, he mentioned that they had just bought an oil by a second-tier cubist.  I probably shouldn’t have asked to see its photo, but I did.  Worse, I even had the bad manners to inquire about the price.

We could debate whether the artist is a 2nd or 3rd tier cubist, but his place in the cubist pantheon is less at issue than the particular painting at hand which, trust me, is a loser.  I may not have much talent, but the one thing I can do best (or at least I’ve deluded myself into thinking so) is discerning good art from bad, usually in an instant.  More self-delusion: I’m not just an idiot savant who only understands Picasso’s art.  And I may not know nearly as much about other artists, but, as far as bad art goes, to pervert the venerable former Justice Stewart’s take on obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”

I suppose you’re thinking sour grapes.  But, I swear on the hopefully not untimely grave of the art dealer who sold them the painting, when a friend or client asks me about a purchase made or about to be made from another source, I give my honest opinion.  If it’s a good piece at a fair price, I say so.  But here, it’s such a bad piece of art that I’d have counseled against it at any price.  To add injury to insult, there are many nice works by lesser cubists that are available within my friend’s budget.

Anyway, what does it matter what I think of your art?  I’m not so self-important to fail to realize, the main thing is that you like it. However, you might live to regret your purchase once your taste has become more sophisticated and your eye more discerning.  Often it’s just a matter of looking at a lot more art.  Following that, and maybe with a bit more conversations or reading along the way, you might find some good alternative choices and even grow to prefer them.   And your future purchases would certainly be expected to appreciate more rapidly as a result of their improved quality.

Even through my Picasso-colored glasses, I still accept the presence of many other great artists and styles of art.  Similarly, I appreciate the need for color as an integral part of the décor one’s home and office, and know that colorful Picassos command a huge premium.  Thankfully, there are many great choices to make if one is on a budget.  As long as we’re talking about cubism, some of the third tier cubists have quite nice paintings and are certainly much more affordable than Picassos of the same medium.

Admittedly, we buy only Picassos these days.  I must admit to almost buying a Warhol last year (sorry, Pablo!), but it was a very early self-portrait gouache in a style reminiscent of Schiele.  Gorgeous, important, incomparable, and not just in my opinion—even the Met bid on it.  But in the end, I just had to buy another Picasso instead.  But that is not to say I can’t help you acquire other artists when you absolutely must veer from the straight and narrow, and in a variety of ways.  My service to clients ranges from just rendering an opinion on something you have found (gratis), to bidding at auction for you (not gratis), to sourcing pieces for you elsewhere (ditto). I guess I’m describing the natural habitat of the animal today called an “art consultant”. What I’m trying to say is, well…I want to be your animal.

-Kobi

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Having just reviewed the Picasso painting market, let’s turn for a moment to see how his prints have been faring. In short, prices have held or gone up, but the most appreciation appears to have occurred among the most valuable prints. The particular winners of the season are the few rare proofs that were offered and, more significantly, the nicer unsigned prints.

The season’s highlights include the beautiful, rare and unpublished but smallish aquatint of Françoise (Baer 907, not in Bloch), which sold with all three states for a whopping $588,000. Yet the first two states are not that beautiful in their own right, primarily interesting in depicting the progression of Picasso’s thoughts. And the third and final state last sold at auction in 2003 for just $45,000. Considering that most of the beauty and value reside in the third state, I would call this a roughly ten-fold appreciation over four years. States II and III are shown below:

An unsigned L’Egyptienne (or, more formally, Torse de femme, B746), generally acknowledged as one of Picasso’s ten best prints, in perfect condition, sold for $121,000, comparing favorably to the last signed one at auction, in suboptimal condition, which brought in around $170,000, as I recall (not in Gordon’s) several months before.

The rare, unsigned and unpublished aquatint commemorating Picasso’s marriage to Jacqueline, Jacqueline en Mariée, De Face I (Baer 1089, not in Bloch) saw its fourteenth state (of eighteen) sell for $50,400, triple the last price for the sixth state (which is at least as nice and, in my opinion, even nicer) half-a-year earlier.

And, of course, Vollard Suite prints, linocuts, and portrait lithographs keep upwardly spiraling, including a Blind Minotaur like ours (Bloch 225), which sold for $154,000. Similarly, the better 347 Series works continued to climb upwards, though they have yet to be fully appreciated.

Great works that remain grossly undervalued, in my opinion, include two late ‘thirties prints in our current inventory (pardon me if this sounds too self-serving): Le Combat (Bloch 301) and Trois Femmes (Les Trois Grâces Couronnées de Fleurs, Bloch 303). Also, the better 156 Series works have yet to catch up, though it’s difficult to judge a market trend on the basis of the single great one that was recently offered.

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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. With the nature of the work now irrelevant, the artist’s name and fame alone matter.” (Art + Auction, July 2007, pp. 41-46) That may be true in general, but the Picasso market seems different. If Picasso was the intellectual’s artist, perhaps his presumably intellectual collectors have a leg up.

The first thing one notices about the Picassos in the spring season is the abundance of great works. At a second glance, the sales were also particularly illustrative of another matter, which I found quite encouraging. Much like real estate, art is all too often valued by the square foot. But, regardless of what my wife may think, size is overrated. Sure, décor matters, and a miniature will not command a large space. But a vibrant work of art with a bold design capable of resolution from across the room will “hold the wall”, even if it’s small. The Picasso market, which seems to be getting smarter all the time, is finally coming around to this realization. Just look at the Picasso paintings of but one recent auction, Sotheby’s NY Evening Sale, May 8, 2007:

1. Tête d’arlequin, 1905, lot 18, oil on panel, 35 cm (13 ¾”), a wonderful rose period portrait, sold for $15,160,000 (with premium).

2. Famille d’arlequin, 1905, lot 21, gouache and ink on card, 29.5 cm (11 5/8”) sold for $9,840,000.

3. Tête de fernande, 1906, lot 24, an oil and gouache on canvas, 37.5 cm (14 ¾”), sold for $6,760,000.

4. Homme à la pipe assis dans un fauteuil, 1916, 32 cm (12 5/8”), an oil and gouache on paper laid down on canvas, sold for $4,744,000.

5. Femme nue, assise contre une draperie, 1922, 24 cm (9 ½”), lot 17 a sculptural woman in oil on panel, sold for $2,392,000.

The only absurdity in these sales, as far as I’m concerned, is number 2 above, which admittedly featured an iconic early Picasso theme and, though colorful and well designed, was poorly drawn, being rather sketchy. It goes to show that the Picasso market, in my opinion, still has a thing or two to learn. In this case, that color isn’t everything. Sure, color matters, but certainly not at the expense of design and graphic quality.

Interestingly, Melikian’s opinion was that the Picassos were relative bargains:

“Throughout the session, money was spent without much discrimination between the great and the merely good. The most astonishing example of this was provided by the contrasting prices fetched within 10 minutes by one of Picasso’s greatest early works and an interesting but forgettable street scene by Lyonel Feininger.

“Picasso’s Tête d’Arlequin, painted in 1905 [number 1 above], ranks among the last major masterpieces of European psychological portraiture. Here the Paris school artist translates the lessons he assimilated from the Old Masters into the idiom of modern art. Although the brushwork is broad, giving precedence to light and shadow over details, the psychological probing is as profound as in any work from past centuries. The estimate, $14 million to $18 million, was steep but not mad for a picture bound to end up someday in one of the world’s leading museums. However, the Picasso did not even match the lower end of its estimate, selling for $13.5 million plus the $1.7 million premium. Whoever won the bidding contest made the cleverest buy of the week.

“Now consider the very different fate of the Feininger, four lots down. Jesuiten III (Jesuits III), painted in 1915, lacks the punch of this artist’s best work. It is little more than a genre scene in a Mannerist style that is unusual for its author. [Mannerist? Maybe, but it also looks like a somewhat derivative, quasi-cubist riff to me.] This did not stop it from establishing a record for the artist, at $23.3 million. The ratio between the prices for the Feininger and the Picasso should have been 1 to 4. Instead, it was roughly 1.5 to 1.”

It didn’t hurt the Feininger’s sale, of course, that it was featured on the front cover of the auction catalogue. Notice, however, to Melikian’s credit, that he didn’t mention the vastly different sizes of these two works. The Feininger measured 75 x 60 cm, contrasting with the Picasso’s 35 x 26.5 cm. In so doing, he seems to have echoed the wisdom of the Picasso market today: size doesn’t matter, at least by comparison to the overall beauty of the art and its importance in the artist’s oeuvre.

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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 question. Here we were discussing the meanings of Picasso’s work on an ethereal level, aspiring to the universal meanings he achieved and not getting bogged down in mundane matters such as politics.

Yet, frankly, the Bush administration forced the issue by covering the tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, which hangs at the entrance of the U.N. Security Council, in preparation for Colin Powell’s fateful call to war. Someone in our government apparently had enough culture to perceive that Guernica is an anti-war statement. Perhaps he knew that it is THE iconic anti-war statement of the last century. Too bad, though, that the UN, whose prime directive is world peace, capitulated to censorship of its anti-war message, if indeed it had any choice—after all, it’s housed on American soil, to accommodate American war mongering.

The U.S. has a long history of censorship of art. Many public sculptures have been rejected, and many art exhibitions have been edited, in order to protect the purported innocence of our people. (Check out the fascinating history of this subject in the very well written book, Visual Shock, by Michael Kammen.) Yet most prior instances of such censorship were spurred by the sexual content of the art, no doubt a holdover of our ancestral Puritanical prudishness.

As for Picasso, we all know what he would have said. He might have even painted a picture, as he did for the Korean War. One hopes that the Maestro’s exhortation for peace would not have fallen on deaf ears.

At least some New Yorkers noticed the flagrant violation of Picasso’s anti-war message. Note the photo of their protest above.

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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 8, 2007:

“A couple who sold art through televised auctions admitted selling bogus works and forging signatures of artists including Picasso, Chagall and Dali in a scam that bilked buyers out of millions of dollars, prosecutors said.

“In court documents filed Monday, Kristine Eubanks, 49, and her husband, Gerald Sullivan, 51, of La Canada, in Los Angeles County, were charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property and violating tax laws.  The operation involved the couple’s satellite television show ‘Fine Arts Treasures Gallery’.  Prosecutors said the couple agreed to cooperate in a continuing criminal probe to capture other scam artists.  The two have not formally entered pleas.

“The government estimated that the show defrauded more than 10,000 people who paid more than $20 million for bogus art.  Investigators seized nearly $4 million when Eubanks and Sullivan were arrested in September.”

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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, and there was also a handful of supporting actors from The Vollard Suite, but the lectures were especially stimulating. Such tremendous erudition that seven scholars brought to bear on a single print for the better part of a day—we loved it!

Interestingly, there seemed to be a consensus that the addition of color not only did not improve upon the print but actually detracted from it.

I have so little to add to such thorough scholarship, but I did rise to the occasion in the Q & A by (lightheartedly) challenging the assumption indicated in the title, as well as the conventional wisdom, that this really is the Master’s finest print. I admitted from the outset that mine is a minor point in the scheme of things, not nearly as enlightening as the investigation into the enigmatic meanings of this masterpiece that the speakers had elaborated. Still, from the point of view of collectors such as you and me, it is not a trivial issue. We are especially mindful of how art historians and others have arranged the hierarchy of his oeuvre. Not only do we find it interesting but also important for us as collectors, because that hierarchy influences how the market values Picasso’s prints, and we are the ones in the trenches who end up paying the price.

The entire afternoon was devoted to exploring the multilayered meanings of La Minotauromachie and their interrelations with Picasso’s oeuvre in general. Rather than belabor the fine points the art historians made, I would refer you instead to the invaluable treatise, Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso’s Classical Prints of the 1930s, by Lisa Florman, one of the speakers. It would provide you with an excellent understanding of much of what was said. In short, however, it became abundantly clear that, at least in the minds of these pundits, the reason they consider it his masterpiece is its incredible thematic complexity.

Another criterion that the pundits mentioned is the importance of this print in the context of the artist’s oeuvre and its central place within it. La Minotauromachie can be viewed as the culmination of The Vollard Suite, Picasso’s most famous print series, and of other related prints of the preceding two to three years, much as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was the culmination of some six hundred earlier works which led up to it.

Somehow I fail to buy the idea that the marketplace, as opposed to the scholars, values La M. because of its thematic complexity, much less its place in Picasso’s oeuvre. I don’t mean to be condescending here, but unlike the pundits, I’m sure that collectors don’t even begin to appreciate the many enigmatic meanings of the etching. Or at least I certainly didn’t before I first read Florman. So it’s not that.

This print, however, is complex not only thematically but also graphically. In the Q & A, the pundits readily agreed with me that its graphic complexity is another one of the contributing reasons for this print’s preeminence. La Minotauromachie is clearly the most intricate, and also for that matter one of the most sizable of Picasso’s prints, and it presumably required the most man-hours to make.

A pet peeve of mine is that Picasso’s collectors and scholars alike do tend to value graphically complex pieces over simple ones. This always reminds me pleasantly of my dear father, a traditional Old-World Jew and a prince of a man, who was in the crystal glassware business. For him, a piece of crystal was nothing if it lacked a lot of carving. And those pieces which had none at all were the worst offenders. He was so surprised, then, by the turn of events when smooth glassware came into vogue. But I have always found this distinction no more defensible for art than for tableware.

We must also allow that the sheer size of La Minotauromachie plays significantly into its valuation, however simplistically. Art, like real estate, is valued according to its square footage. Not that size isn’t important—a great work of art would generally become all the more imposing by dint of its monumentality. But, clearly, size alone (much like the presence or absence of the Master’s signature) does not great art make. And one hardly needs to list the many diminutive Picasso paintings, drawings, and prints that number among his all-time greatest.

The extent to which La Minotauromachie’s value is the result of the intricacy of its design is, in a sense, unfortunate. We certainly don’t need Picasso for detailed canvases or coppers—traditional art was already rife with them long before his birth. On the contrary, one of Picasso’s pivotal innovations was his economy of brushstroke and line, which did not at all diminish and, in a true measure of his genius, even enhanced the emotional evocativeness of his results. Today, in the wake of minimalism and other trends, it is no great shakes to encounter art with few shapes and forms. Picasso’s genius was not only that he introduced such reductionism, but also that he all the more was able to infuse these spare images with such emotional intensity.

Because economy of line and graphic complexity are natural opposites and cannot coexist, the valuation of economy of line in a work must neutralize its simultaneous valuation along the criterion of complexity. In other words, one can value a piece with only one of these criteria at a time.

There’s a certain amount of herd mentality in the print world. The hierarchy of Picasso’s print prices was set long ago—so long, it seems, that it has long since fossilized—and it would seemingly take a sea change to alter it. The recent price ascendancy of late Picasso is thankfully an example of just such a sea change, but it has been a long time in the making, it’s still in progress, and it has a long way to go, in my opinion, before it’s done.

There are other criteria that collectors and art lovers in general use that certainly don’t escape the scholars’ attention, but, I would argue, are not nearly as important to them, as they are to us, in their valuations. These chiefly are the beauty, graphic mastery, and poignancy of the work of art. I would further submit that if these were the primary criteria in judging Picasso’s greatest print, La M. would not come out on top, at least in the minds of many Picasso lovers and collectors. It might be included in one’s short list of the top 10, or not. But that list, in my opinion, ought to include works such as Le Repas Frugal (Bloch 1), the Blind Minotaur aquatint (Bloch 225), La Femme qui Pleure, I (Bloch 1333), Torse de Femme (L’Egyptienne; Bloch 746), and other favorites. I’d add certain small prints to my short list with which few would agree, by the way, such as Tête de Femme de Profil (Bloch 6), Tête de Femme (Bloch 256) or Contrée (Bloch 362), but that’s just me. Speaking of this Blind Minotaur, however (and there are four such prints in all, so let’s be clear we’re talking about the best of them, the last of the series), consider that the figures in this masterpiece are much better executed than in La M. The sightless Minotaur himself is much more expertly depicted and conveys his anguish so much more poignantly and beautifully than his sighted portrayal in La M. The other figures in the Blind Minotaur are also better. I’m not especially fond of the female torero in La M, with her crooked, thin nose and tight lips, not at all a flattering portrait of Marie-Thérèse, to whom some of the scholars attribute the subject. The young girl of La M. is nice, but the depiction of Marie-Thérèse in the Blind Minotaur is just as nice and is more stylistically interesting.

After the conference, LACMA’s chief curator of prints and drawings, the esteemed Kevin Salatino, did allow that he and his colleagues had in fact struggled with the title of the exhibit, but “Picasso’s Second Greatest Print” would not have gone over very big. True, of course. And funny. But by now, those of you who have bothered to read my tripe to any extent would know that your prime directive is to seek beauty and value, and not to be deterred, and indeed to be encouraged, when your conclusions do not reflect the conventional wisdom.

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Now that the dust has settled after the fall auction season and the pundits have all weighed in on the current art market, it’s time to look at the recent Picasso sales in greater depth. The season has been marked by a number of notable events, chiefly a Picasso that would have been the highest-priced painting ever sold (La Rêve, 1932), had Steve Wynn not put his elbow through it. It would have been a short-lived triumph anyway, since the sale of a rather homely Pollock shortly thereafter topped it (reportedly) by a million. The prices of these paintings were predictable, in that they just exceeded the previously highest-priced sale, the Lauder Klimt. Clearly, art collecting is a blood sport in which the well-heeled have a competitive advantage. To win at this manhood ritual, all you have to do is break the world’s record for the costliest painting. The good news is that there’s actually twice as much room at the top as may appear at first glance, because both the seller and the buyer get to hold this distinction.

But it is the NY auctions, with their much more plentiful data points, that are the most instructive. One needs first to address the purported weakening of the Picasso market, of which a couple of writers have made hay. Upon closer analysis, this conclusion is apparently based on two high-end Picasso paintings, one at each of the two major auction houses, and several mid-range and low-end paintings, all of which were estimated too high. Sure it’s easy to draw this conclusion in hindsight, but even Sotheby’s has acknowledged it. Referring to these two paintings, Sotheby’s online publication allows, “At Christie’s, the top offering by Picasso sold well below the low end of its estimate (Femmes à la fontaine at $12,896,000; estimate $15-20 million). At Sotheby’s, Le Sauvetage went unsold during the auction, against an estimate of $12-16 million…. The lesson? The relationship between quality and estimate is key to attracting bids and the right balance is essential - even for the artist of the 20th century (Sotheby’s Art Market Review November 2006: Impressionist and Modern Art).” But the Femmes à la fontaine, though historically significant perhaps, is neither particularly pretty nor interesting. And Le Sauvetage, though quite colorful, has an undistinguished and jumbled design, no comparison to a much better example of the series which had fetched $14,792,000 at Sotheby’s NY in 2004.

The painting that I had predicted would set a new world’s record, Portrait of Angel F. de Soto (1903, Z. I, no. 201), was withdrawn prior to the sale amid controversy regarding its rightful ownership (another Nazi confiscation scandal), presumably causing much deflation of suspense, certainly in my mind.

The mid-range and low-end paintings that did poorly were similarly lackluster works. A prime example of these was Femme dans un rocking-chair (1956, Z. XVII, no. 49), which was bought in. A large painting, true, but a hefty price tag (estimate $7-10M) for an uninspiring, homely portrait.

On the other hand, a number of decent mid-range and low-end paintings, sculptures, and drawings sold within their estimates or well above them. Examples:
Nu assis sur bleu (1939, est. $1,000,000-1,500,000, sold for $4,328,000)
Buste de femme (1929, Z. VII, no.245, est. $1,500,000-2,000,000, sold for $3,376,000)
Chouette (a small painted-metal owl, 1961, est. $600-800,000, sold for $2,648,000)
Portrait d’Olga (pencil on paper, 1920, Palau I Fabre no. 872, est. $800,000 – 1,200,000, sold for $2,592,000
Tête de femme, Gosol (pen and ink and [faint] blue crayon on paper, 1906, Z. 22, no. 448, est. $400-600,000, sold for $1,020,000)
Femme à la cruche (pen and ink on paper, 1919, Z. III, no. 294, est. $100-150,000, sold for $312,000)
Têtes de profil (brush and ink on paper, 1907, Z. XXVI, no. 14, est. $600-800,000, sold for $792,000)
Tête d’homme barbu (watercolor, ink wash, and clharcoal on paper, 1965, Z. XXV, no. 181, est. $280-320,000, sold for $643,200)
Tête couronnée (black wax crayon on paper, 1960, Z. XIX, no. 367, est. $70-90,000, sold for $228,000)

And the odd exceptional drawing and low-end painting performed at roughly double their estimates. Examples:
Plant de tomates (1944, Z. XIV, no. 26, est. $5-7M, sold for $13.456M, illustrated above)
Femme nue à sa toilette (pencil on card, 1970, Z. XXXII, no. 42, est. $100-150,000, sold for $240,000):

Despite its diminutive size (5×8″), the market correctly perceived its beauty, though its provenance (ex Sean Connery) may have given the bidding an extra kick. Interestingly, Picasso used a similar artifice in two of these drawings, which I believe are not otherwise seen in his work. Note how in Femme nue à sa toilette the subject’s fingers imperceptibly blend with the locks of her hair in (Do the lines represent locks of hair, or fingers? Answer: both.) Similarly, in Portrait d’Olga (illustrated below), drawn an even half-century before, one of the fingers becomes a fold of Olga’s dress.

The “pretty” pictures predictably fared well. To wit:
Portrait d’Olga (pencil on paper, 1920, Palau I Fabre no. 872, est. $800,000 – 1,200,000, sold for $2,592,000; mentioned above, but belongs also in this category)
Portrait de Madame Patri (pencil on paper, 1918, Wofsy 18-162, est. $700,000 – 1,000,000, sold for $1,136,000).
Les trois graces (pencil on paper, 1931, not in Z. or W., est. $200-300,000, sold for $444,000

A modestly colorful and questionably pretty picture, but too plain to be personally appealing, also performed nicely:
Dans la loge: Portrait de Jane Avril (charcoal and pastel on paper, 1901, not in Z. or W., est. $500-700,000, sold for $1,528,000)

What conclusions can we draw from all of this? To me, the inescapable conclusion is that Picasso buyers are a discerning lot. We’re ready to pay well above the estimates for works we love, but are unwilling to throw money at undeserving art, regardless of the auctioneer’s estimates and marketing.

Turning to the print world, its market remained strong and steady. Unlike the drawings and paintings, virtually every lot sold. The sales’ highlights were arguably the following two lots at Sotheby’s. A unique, unsigned impression of the fifth state of a small, significant but, to my eye, not very appealing aquatint of Dora Maar (Femme a u fauteuil et au chapeau, 1939, Baer 647) sold for $330,000, thanks to the cover design and a three-page catalogue spread. But a set of four very rare unsigned proofs, progressive states of an unpublished lithograph, Femmes d’Alger, d’apres Delacroix (1955, Baer 917) was bought in at the hammer price of $130,000, proving that marketing is not everything. Despite two catalogue pages and a lengthy description, the market correctly perceived that these images were not great art, certainly no comparison to the fabulous and even rarer lithograph of the same title, (Mourlot 266).

As for me, having to make responsible decisions not only as an impassioned collector but also as a dealer, the market was so strong that I amazingly could only buy one lithograph and one painting, and only then because they fell through the cracks.

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