LONDON – Champagne taste but beer pocket money, it’s been our problem since we started collecting 40 years ago. With that in mind then, we’re unlikely to be in the bidding when Christie’s offer their latest blockbuster: Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger.
The work, painted in 1955, on my business manager (Mrs. P’s) birthday – Feb. 14 – is expected to fetch around $140 million (94.4 million pounds) in New York next month. Word on the street is that it’s already sold.
A guarantee underwritten by one of Christie’s billionaire art collectors means that even if no one bids on the night, he (or she) will take it home at an undisclosed price agreed prior to the public auction.
Factor in the buyer’s premium payable to the auctioneers, and it’s likely to become the most expensive painting sold at auction ever.
So here’s the challenge: Find a Picasso affordable by the man in the street. Impossible, you might say. Read on.
Picasso was a prolific printmaker, using all the different techniques to master the art. His lithographs, etchings, drypoints, linocuts, woodcuts and aquatints were all experiments aimed at pushing the boundaries of his art further and further.
Indeed, some of Picasso’s graphic works are combinations of several techniques, which really tested his printmakers’ skills. Pottery-making, underlining the diversity of his interest, also fascinated him. Buy wisely and it’s possible to buy works in either medium that need not break the bank.
We’ve never been on a cruise ship, but we are reliably informed that among the temptations to spend money while aboard are paintings and prints by well-known artists, framed and ready to take home from the holiday of a lifetime, usually at eye-watering prices. This is not how to buy a Picasso print.
By sheer coincidence, in the week that Christie’s announced their blockbuster, a regional auctioneer was offering three signed etchings on behalf of a client who had purchased them at a liquidation sale from a cruise ship dealer whose business had failed.
From Picasso’s dazzling group of etchings done in 1968 when the artist was in his 80s, known as the 347 Series and named after the number of prints it comprised, the three images were each from editions limited to 50 copies, estimated attractively at between 500 and 1,200 pounds apiece. The most expensive, Pintor Rembranesco con su modelo (below), sold for 2,400 pounds.
Picasso himself described the images as his way of writing fiction. He said: “I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they’re up to.” For works linked inextricably to the great artist, that seems extraordinarily affordable.
Rêveries d’Opium: Fumeur en Calotte papale (below), another etching from Picasso’s 347 Series, sold for £2,100, while a third etching earned 2,250 pounds. (Ewbank’s Auctioneers photo)
Picasso’s first venture into printmaking was a series of 15 drypoints and etchings called Les Saltimbanques, or The street acrobats, done in 1905 and published by the dealer Vollard in 1913. More followed in the early 1930s but it was not until after World War II that most of Picasso’s prints were created.
From 1945 to 1949, he produced a massive body of about 200 lithographs working in close co-operation with Henri Deschamps, a professional printmaker from the Mourlot studio, a renowned art publisher and print workshop in Paris.
Picasso prints abound, of course. Those from large editions, made after the artist’s death and obviously unsigned, by skilled printmakers copying his drawings as their base material are still highly decorative, although not necessarily good vehicles for investment.
The ones to avoid are those that purport to have been signed by the master but whose signatures are also copied in photographic processes from which the cheapest of prints are produced.
Or you could just buy them anyway because they look great in any trendy minimalist setting when framed and hung together. When you get bored with them you simply throw them away and replace them with new, cheap alternatives.
If wall space is at a premium, consider Picasso’s pots as another affordable route to explore. It was certainly his hope that they might be enjoyed by the masses. He said: “I would like them to be found in every market, so that, in a village in Brittany or elsewhere, one might see a woman going to the fountain to fetch water with one of my jars.”
Picasso’s excursion into the world of ceramics began while he was on holiday in the South of France in 1946. Summers were spent on the Cote d’Azur where he was inspired by the light and the bright Mediterranean colors.
On a visit to the Madoura Pottery in the small town of Vallauris, he met the workshop’s owners, Suzanne and Georges Ramié, who sat him at a bench and handed him a lump of clay.
He made three pieces, which he left at the pottery to be fired, and that might have been the end of it. However, on returning a year later, he was so impressed with his handiwork that he asked permission to make more.
The experience fired Picasso’s imagination and from that humble beginning, his passion for pots was ignited. Working closely with the Ramiés and their team, Picasso designed many playful pieces decorated with bullfighting scenes, portraits, and goats, birds and fish.
In the space of 24 years, more than 600 pieces were created in limited editions, from which thousands of others were produced, all marked with the Madoura stamp.
The visits to the pottery were among the happiest of Picasso’s life. He found that working with clay was a relaxing diversion from the strain and demands of his painting and he told his biographer Pierre Daix that he felt at home at Madoura.
His personal life also benefitted from the time he spent there. Picasso’s lover Françoise Gilot gave birth to a son, Claude, during his first year at the pottery, and Jacqueline Roque, who worked there, became Picasso’s wife and muse, remaining his partner for more than 20 years until his death in 1973.
