Nearly 200 Picasso works coming up for auction, but records are unlikely

Picasso has been in art news headlines in the past week with a story about the Gagosian taking legal action to confirm its title to a plaster sculture, Bust of a Woman (Marie-Thérèse) (1931) that was apparently purchased behind its back (directly from Maya Widmaier-Picasso at well below its market value) while the gallery was trying to sell it for a much higher price…
With the halo that surrounds Pablo PICASSO and everything he created, transactions involving his works are often tensely negotiated affairs. The numbers are of course enormous: in 2015 the secondary market exchanged no less than $567.6 million of the master’s works. This was in fact a new annual record for the Spanish artist, and it includes a new world record for the sale of an artwork at auction after Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) fetched $179.3 million on 11 May 2015 at Christie’s in New York.

Since the year 2000, Picasso’s price index has risen 177% (+95% in the last decade). It is therefore not a bad time to sell, and this fact has not escaped Pablo Picasso’s grand-daughter Marina, who is about to disperse part of her collection.

Marina was born in 1950 in Cannes, to Picasso’s son and first wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova. At the painter’s death in 1973, Picasso left behind 50,000 works that needed to be distributed to a large and divided family… with no will to guide the executors. Marina inherited no less than a fifth of the works, including more than 300 paintings and thousands of drawings, sculptures and ceramics. Part of that legacy has already been dispersed via direct sales and auctions in recent years, primarily to provide funds for Marina’s philanthropic activities. In June 2015, she commissioned Sotheby’s to sell an incredible collection of 126 ceramic works by her grandfather. The sale was a success, generating $17.7 million, including more than $763,000 for the Cabri vase which quadrupled its estimate.

However, Marina’s next sale on 5 February 2016 in London is a very different matter: entitled Picasso in private: works from the collection of Marina Picasso, it will offer an exceptional collection of nearly 200 works; mainly drawings, ceramics and a few small sculptures. For those who think Picasso is beyond their reach… think again! a very small assembled head (5 x 3.8 cm) is carrying a low estimate of just $6,000 while for $9,000 to 12,000 you may be able to acquire an artist’s palette or a small terracotta deer-head. Many “small” lots are being offered for less than $50,000 and that includes a number of ceramic works. The most expensively estimated piece is a woman’s face carved in paper and embellished with a few strokes of blue ink (18 cm high), a little game that the artist played in 1962 that is expected to fetch $300,000 – $350,000. We are therefore a long way from his masterpieces that fetch millions.

Although the sale is certainly newsworthy for its impeccable provenance and exceptional density, it is almost anecdotal in terms of quality. Don’t expect any records to be broken…