Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) — Pablo Picasso met Francoise Gilot, then a 21-year-old painter, in a Paris restaurant in 1943 during the Nazi occupation, and the two became lovers. While artists such as Max Ernst fled Paris for the U.S., Picasso hung tough even though the Germans prohibited his art from being shown.
“People of my generation admired Picasso because he stayed,” says Gilot, now 90, who lives in Manhattan. “We thought mostly of that courage.”
After the war, in 1948, Picasso and Gilot settled in Vallauris in southern France. The move was liberating for Picasso, spurring a burst of experimentation with sculptures, ceramics and lithographs. Beginning on April 30, works from this period will make up the fourth in a series of Picasso exhibitions at Larry Gagosian’s galleries in new York and London, Bloomberg Pursuits reports in its premier issue.
The Gagosian shows unite the world’s biggest fine art dealer and its best-selling artist over the past decade. The involvement of Picasso’s heirs and his most noted biographer, John Richardson, have turned the exhibitions into blockbusters by private-gallery standards. The first three events drew a total of 260,000 visitors to view about 300 artworks.
“Having the opportunity to work closely with John Richardson and the Picasso family on what will be our fourth major exhibition has been professionally, and on a personal level, one of the most exciting chapters in the gallery’s history,” Gagosian says.
Three-quarters of the pieces in these exhibitions were either loaned by or consigned from Picasso’s family, including his children and grandchildren, giving collectors their first look at many works.
“Each of Picasso’s seven heirs inherited a remarkable collection of the artist’s work,” says Richardson, who’s finishing the final book of his four-volume biography, A Life of Picasso (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, 1996, 2007).
The shows exemplified the strategy Gagosian, 66, has used to expand to 11 galleries in Asia, Europe and the U.S. after opening his first gallery in a 10-foot-wide (3-meter-wide) former Hungarian restaurant in Los Angeles in 1977, he has built an A-list roster of clients, including hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen, private-equity magnate Leon Black and real-estate investor and philanthropist Eli Broad. Gagosian often jumps into a rising market and lifts it even higher, says Beverly Schreiber Jacoby, president of new York-based BSJ Fine Art and a valuation specialist.
In 2010, the year after Gagosian put on Picasso: Mosqueteros, which focused on his late works from the 1960s and 1970s, a collector paid $18 million for a 1964 Picasso painting — a record for this period. That topped the prior high of $17.4 million set in 2008. in November 2011, an unnamed collector set a new record, paying $23 million for a 1967 Picasso depicting a naked man playing a recorder for his nude lover.
“Gagosian is a great marketer,” says Michael Steinhardt, chairman of hedge fund WisdomTree Investments inc. and a buyer of Picassos in the 1980s and 1990s. “He has created a force in the market by accumulating paintings and having wonderful exhibitions.”
Richardson, 88, a Briton who was a friend of Picasso’s from 1949 until the artist’s death in 1973, has served as a curator for the shows. He wrote long, scholarly essays for the unusually large, 300-page hardcover catalogs, which included letters and photographs of the artist in addition to plates of his artworks. Richardson says the fourth show will focus on the influence that Gilot, whose image appears in ceramics, lithographs and paintings, and the town of Vallauris had on Picasso’s work.
You might find this interesting :-)
- TWoP 10: Resolutions For TV Shows (The 2011 Edition) – The Telefile Blog – TV Shows & TV News – TV Reviews
- How to Look Hot When You’re Naked
- $298 million up for grabs in weekend lotteries
- Rolex $3.5 Million Mentoring Program Taps Eno, Kapoor, Sellars
- Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper – Britain/Ireland