Not bad for a day's work

Rico says it doesn't matter whether you 'get' Picasso or not, this is an amazing ArtsBeat story by Carol Vogel in The New York Times:

A painting that Picasso created in a single day in March of 1932, Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust), sold for $106.5 million, a world record auction price for a work of art, at Christie’s. The painting, more than five feet by four feet, shows Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, reclining and as a bust. Picasso’s profile can be discerned in the blue background.
The painting broke the record price for a work of art set in February when a Giacometti sculpture, Walking Man I, sold for $104.3 million at Sotheby’s in London. Bidding for the Picasso lasted eight minutes and six seconds; there were six bidders. Nicholas Hall, an expert at Christie’s, took the winning bid by telephone. He declined to say who he was bidding for.
Nu au Plateau comes from the collection of the Los Angeles philanthropist Frances Lasker Brody, who died in November and was the wife of the real estate developer Sidney F. Brody. It is one of a group from the Brody estate being sold at Christie’s this spring, including works by Matisse, Braque, and Giacometti. The painting has been publicly exhibited only once since 1951, the last time it changed hands. The year it was painted, 1932, is considered a turning point for the artist; it was then that he began creating luscious canvases of Marie-Thérèse that were unlike anything he had done before: bigger and more sensual.

In a related ArtsBeat story about a different Picasso by Dave Itzkoff:

Iraqi security forces displayed what they said was a Picasso painting, who they said had been stolen during the occupation of Kuwait in 1990. The artwork, said to be called The Naked Woman, was taken from the Kuwait National Museum during the Iraqi invasion that preceded the first gulf war. They said a former soldier had been trying to sell the painting, and that it was seized in a raid on his house in Hillah, about sixty miles south of Baghdad. The painting was said to have Picasso’s signature and the stamps of the Kuwaiti museum as well as the Louvre, but a Louvre official told The A.P. that it has never had a Picasso in its collection and does not sell its works because they are government property. The Art Loss Register in London said it had no record of any paintings missing from the Kuwait National Museum, and no record of this particular painting as missing.

Rico says it doesn't even look like a Picasso...