Picasso Painting to Go For Record Price

The art world is buzzing about Sotheby’s sale of Picasso’s Garcon a la Pipe, scheduled for next week. The painting, done when Picasso was in his 20’s, may bring $100 million, which would break the record set fourteen years ago by van Gogh’s Portrait of Doctor Gachet. Here is the painting; it is indisputably lovely:
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There are a lot of paintings I’d pay more for; near the top of the list would be Rembrandt’s heartbreaking and stunningly beautiful Lucretia, which the much-underrated Minneapolis Art Institute bought for far less:
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Lucretia is a sort of negative image of the Garcon; it’s fun to count the ways. Rembrandt’s vision was at home in the 17th century, and, I think, in our own. Picasso seems, to me, a relic of the past.

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