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The other night at a Christie's auction in New York, a painting entitled Woman with Crossed Arms went for $55 million -- a record for a Picasso and one of the highest prices ever paid for a painting at auction.
This is crazy.
The experts will explain this staggeringly high price by talking about how rare it is for works from Picasso's early Blue Period to come up for sale. But this painting, which was sold by Chicago's McCormick family, had been on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago since 1972. I've seen it several times, and I can tell you it's just flat out not a great painting.
Without knowing who the anonymous buyer was, it's hard to say exactly what happened. A half-dozen bidders were willing to pay more than $32 million for the painting, and two dueling telephone bidders drove the price up from there. The few dozen wealthy collectors who can afford to pay such a price for a painting seem convinced that Picasso is one of the rare gold-plated geniuses -- that investing in his artworks will always pay off. But Woman with Crossed Arms is a minor early work, painted in 1901, the year Picasso turned 20. Whoever bought it overpaid.
DWINDLING CACHET? The high price says more about collectors' big egos and the oddities of the art market than it does about aesthetic values. Plus, I suspect Picasso's reputation is due for a reevaluation. It may not happen in the next few years, but it probably will in the next 15 to 20. If the buyer happens to be, say, a business exec aged about 55 who plans to bequeath Woman with Crossed Arms to a museum at around age 70, that buyer could be in for a rude awakening. I'll bet the painting won't have nearly the cachet -- or market value -- it has today.
In stock market terms, Picasso is eBay, Amazon, and Cisco all rolled into one at the height of the Internet craze. Collectors figure he was the key figure in a historic shift in artistic development and there's no way he'll fade, at least not anytime soon. And on the supply side, there are plenty of Picassos around. The painter, who died in 1973 at age 92, often churned out a painting a day, right up until his death. His oeuvre consists of thousands and thousands of works.
The best Picassos regularly fetch stratospheric prices. Last fall, the artist's Nude on a Black Armchair, a 1932 portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of his mistresses, was gaveled down at $45.5 million. The rumored buyer was Leslie Wexner, chairman of The Limited Inc. Woman Sitting in a Garden, another Picasso portrait, sold for $49.5 million.
In 1997, The Dream, another portrait of Walter, went for $48 million. A second Picasso portrait, Woman Sitting in an Armchair (Eva), went for $24 million that year. (It was of another of Picasso's mistresses, Eva Gouel, who died in 1915.) The rumored buyers: Ronald and Leonard Lauder (of Estée Lauder International and two of the most powerful art collectors in the world).
STRATOSPHERIC PRICES. But these few big sales only give a faint idea of the size of the industry that has developed around Picasso. So far in 2000, some 30 paintings by the artist have been sold at auction for a total of more than $150 million, according to the database at Artnet.com. And that's just public sales -- it doesn't include all the paintings sold privately by galleries and art dealers. Nor does it include the artist's sculptures, sketches, lithographs, tapestries, and works in other media.
The only painter who consistently fetches higher prices than Picasso is Vincent van Gogh. His Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which was bought in 1990 by a Japanese businessman for $82.5 million, is still the highest-priced painting ever. Plus, a van Gogh self-portrait sold at auction in 1998 for $71.5 million. Like Picasso, van Gogh was prolific. But he died at age 37. A mere 870 paintings have been attributed to him, and many of them are owned by museums.
Lots of the Picassos that have fetched stratospheric prices are brilliant, but Woman with Crossed Arms isn't one of them. It was painted in a sentimental, elongated style that Picasso largely abandoned in mid-1907 with Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon, his first great foray into Cubism. It's important mainly because the four-year-long Blue Period (and later the Rose Period) paved the way for Picasso's more important work. A new book, The Ultimate Picasso by Brigitte Léal, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac (Abrams; $95), paraphrases the opinion of writer Alberto Moravia to explain the period's importance: painting in "...the blue monochrome was for Picasso one way of confirming his personal vision of the world and of making the break with naturalism that was a precondition for Cubism."
Even if you accept that the Blue Period is historically important, however, Woman with Crossed Arms isn't one of the period's stronger works. Author Léal, who is curator of the Picasso Museum in Paris and wrote the section of The Ultimate Picasso that deals with the artist's early works, anoints a painting called La Vie, owned by the Cleveland Museum of Art, as the Blue Period's "masterpiece." She reproduces Woman with Crossed Arms in the book, but only on a two-page spread with five other portraits from the period. The space in which Woman with Crossed Arms is depicted is smaller than that given to the others, and it's the only one in black and white -- an indication that Léal judges it to be a lesser painting.
EGO PURCHASE. But what's a collector to do? Blue Period Picassos rarely come to market, so if you want one at all, you have to pay top dollar, regardless of quality. Most of the other really famous Blue Period paintings, like La Vie, are owned by museums. The Old Guitar Player, perhaps the best known, is at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Blind Man's Meal resides at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. La Celestina is at the Picasso Museum in Paris, and there are several at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.
The most likely scenario here is that a major collector who already owns important Picassos wanted to fill out his collection ("his" because there are very few women with that kind of money -- more on that later). Which is to say that this probably was an ego purchase by someone so wealthy that $55 million is small change. The other possibility is that a new collector, who has made big bucks in the stock market, plunged in. Woman with Crossed Arms is just the sort of painting such a collector would buy. It's a sentimental, figurative work that's much easier to understand than the difficult Cubist paintings. You can hang it on your wall and show it off to friends, and no one's going to say, "Gee, I don't get it."
The big risk for the buyer -- aside from the fact that the painting isn't that great -- is that art pricing is fickle. The story behind a particular work can have a lot do with its market valuation. Van Gogh's tragic life gives his paintings cachet, for instance, and The Portrait of Dr. Gachet had tons of cachet because it was of the doctor who was treating the artist and was painted just before van Gogh committed suicide. Trouble is, the types of stories that resonate most with the public and collectors may change over time.
HARSH PORTRAYALS. I believe two broad trends are likely to work against Picasso over the next couple of decades. The first is globalization. We tend to think of European and American art as "the greatest" because those were the first areas of the world to industrialize -- and to be able to afford the collectors, museums, art galleries, university art departments, art journals, and other expensive mechanisms of taste-making.
As the global economy develops, however, Asia, Latin America, and Africa are going to become wealthier, and their taste is going to have more weight. As that happens, our preferences are likely to change in unpredictable ways. I think Picasso's reputation will be vulnerable because he borrowed many of his ideas from African tribal art. My guess is that a consensus may develop that Picasso was a pillager and that the real credit for many of his supposed innovations should go to anonymous tribal artists.
The other trend that may work against Picasso is women's rise to equality. The art world has been incredibly retrograde in its treatment of women until recently. For instance, there were almost no women artists in R.W. Janson's History of Art, the standard college textbook first published in 1962. In the 1990s new editions did alter that perspective, and only now are women scholars and curators finally moving into positions of great influence. There still are virtually no major women collectors, other than the wives of some wealthy men.
But as women do continue their ascent in the art world, Picasso's reputation could suffer. Picasso was tremendously cruel to the many women (and children) in his life. And I find many of his portrayals of women terribly harsh. I think that may work against him, as women become more influential in taste-making. There's a good chance that Picasso will go the way of Hemingway -- who, by the way, I think is now undervalued because of an overreaction against his macho brittleness.
Picasso, of course, will still be seen as a great genius. I'm not disputing that. But we're talking about market prices here, and they tend to be subject to fads. The price someone just paid for Woman with Crossed Arms is yet another confirmation that art prices don't always have a lot to do with pure aesthetics.
Peterson is a contributing editor at Business Week Online. Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BW Online Edited by Beth Belton
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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