More on expensive Picassos

Holland Cotter has an article in The New York Times about the recent Christie's auction:

Whatever the state of the global economy, there’s always a ton of discretionary cash floating around looking for someplace to land. Tuesday night at Christie’s a chunk of it— $106.5 million to be exact— landed on a Picasso painting called Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, setting a record for art sold at auction. Despite the high figure, the whole thing feels a bit ho-hum. These days so much money is in so many hands, and so many of those hands are after trophy art, that record-breaking has become routine, de rigueur.
Two, three, four million extra? Worth it. After all, if you’re the evening’s big spender, you not only get to own an object you’ve just helped to make fantastically valuable, but your extravagance, with your name attached or not, also buys a mention in the news. You could lay out the same bucks for a hospital wing, but it wouldn’t be the same. (The Picasso is from the estate of Frances Lasker Brody. The Brodys’ Los Angeles home, by the way, where it had hung for decades, was just listed for a quarter of the price of the picture.)
But back to the painting. Madly puffed in Christie’s sales catalog by the longtime Picasso biographer John Richardson, it dates from a single day in 1932 when the artist was, depending on your point of view, at the magical top of his game, or just not trying very hard. With collectors the late 1920s and early ’30s have become a golden phase in Picasso’s career— Acquavella Galleries made the period the subject of a museum-style show in 2008— thanks to a series of paintings that feature a blond female figure, the same one found in Nude, Green Leaves and Bust.
Standard accounts of Picasso’s art tend to be built on a one-woman, one-style model. The muse for the 1930s series was Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was a teenager when she met the middle-aged Picasso in Paris. A standard tale of lust and deceit ensued. The two became lovers; Picasso was married; everything had to be kept hush-hush, nothing could stop their love, etc., etc.
To celebrate this passion Picasso painted Walter (whom Mr. Richardson repeatedly refers to as a girl, as in “this simple, sweet-natured girl”, even when she is in her 20s) over and over, usually depicting her nude, recumbent, twisted, sexually available, but with her eyes closed as if in a post-coital doze. It’s a classic dynamic: active lover-artist, passive lover-muse. Picasso reconstituted it in his art over and over throughout his life.
But, of course, this was hardly the whole story. Picasso’s art is made up of a jumpy bundle of influences: art history, ethnology, popular culture, philosophy, contemporary art. Eros might have been a stimulant, but pure competitiveness kept his motor humming. In the Walter paintings, he is looking hungrily at Ingres and with a rivalrous eye at Matisse. The Christie’s picture is like a cartoon version of each, with some wacky stage props added: a classical bust, some Cézanne oranges, and Picasso himself directing from behind a curtain.
It’s an entertaining picture. Picasso was a born entertainer, a comic ham. I think that’s one reason for his immense popularity, though it’s not what’s great, meaning original, in his art. His toughness is. The seed of that is found in early Cubist painting and collage, with their shaking-apart structures, razor-sharp slices into space, and disorienting confusions of art, language, time, and accident. Everything about that work was new and not easy, and still is.
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust and other paintings from its period are old and easy, art as usual. They keep to the known, the pleasure zone; they keep old orders firm, artist over subject, man over woman, woman as thing, a pink blob with closed eyes. “Ironically, this painting, which celebrates feminine submissiveness, was executed on International Woman’s Day; this would have delighted Picasso.” That’s Mr. Richardson’s final comment on the most expensive painting ever to hit the block.