Picasso Masterpiece Put on Sales Block : ‘La Celestina,’ After 50 Years in Private Hands, May Draw Huge Bid

The present owner of one of Pablo Picasso’s greatest masterpieces--the one-eyed blue lady known as “La Celestina”--has announced that it is up for sale.

After half a century in private hands, the painting was purchased and put on exhibit recently by Didier Imbert, a hot young Parisian dealer, according to an article in the July issue of Connoisseur.

“La Celestina” is not only a major work from Picasso’s blue period but one of the chief achievements of the artist’s entire career.

The true value of the work can be determined only by the market. The last important painting by the Spanish master for sale was “Yo Picasso,” painted in 1904, which sold for $5.3 million in 1981.

That figure seems low for today’s superheated art market--especially, Imbert said, because Picasso’s prices have always rivaled those of Van Gogh.

“After Van Gogh’s ‘Irises’ fetched $53.9 million at auction last November,” Imbert said, “who is to say what price Picasso’s blue lady might command?”

Marc Blondeau, the Paris-based modern art expert who left Sotheby’s last year to open his own consultancy, predicted that at auction the painting would break the records for 20th-Century works in general and for Picasso in particular.

There is a problem, however. A law designed to protect France’s national artistic heritage forbids the export of any work worth more than 3 million francs (about $526,300) unless approved by the minister of culture.

The top French museums do not have the money to buy the painting at its market price. They could hold a fund-raising drive, or the authorities could adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Without an export permit, “La Celestina” is worth only a third of its value at international auction.

Imbert remains unfazed. He might cut a deal with the authorities or, Patricia Corbett wrote in Connoisseur, he can wait until 1992 when, he said, “most import and export limitations will be abolished among the Common Market countries.”

“La Celestina” was painted in 1904, when Picasso was a precocious 23-year-old shuttling between Paris and Barcelona in search of success.

“The miracle of ‘La Celestina,’ ” according to Mario Teresa Ocana, curator of the Museo Picasso in Barcelona, “is Picasso’s ability to extract a novel, almost symbolic form of beauty from an image which is intrinsically repellent. It is a very great work.”

Picasso is said to have considered it one of his two or three most significant works. Although he kept only experimental works or very personal pictures--those of mistresses and children--he hung onto “La Celestina” for about 30 years.

Who was this beautiful, yet repulsively flawed, figure, the one-eyed woman with graying hair and chin hairs who at the same time is pink-cheeked and almost coquettish?

Picasso provided a clue to her identity by writing a name and a Barcelona address--”Carlota Valdivia, Calle Conde Asalto, 12-4”--on the stretcher of the canvas.

But he preferred the painting be called “La Celestina,” an infamous name in Spanish literature, the scheming procuress described as a sorceress in Fernando de Roja’s 1499 “Comedia de Calisto y Melibea.”