«I LIKE MONEY ON THE WALL»

RECORD prices make big headlines. And they don’t come bigger than the story of Christie’s sale in New York on May 4th in which eight private collectors, including one Russian and another from Asia, fought over a richly coloured portrait Pablo Picasso painted of his young mistress during an unusual spurt of creativity in the spring of 1932, when he was 50 years old.
“Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” had belonged to the same American family since 1951. It had been shown just once in public and had only ever been photographed in black-and-white. The five-foot-high painting sold for $106.5m, the second $100m-plus price achieved for a work of art at auction this year (see article). (Alberto Giacometti's sculpture “L'Homme qui Marche I” fetched $104.3m at Sotheby's in February.)

-The Economist
May 9 2010