One bright spot at Sotheby’s: Steve Wynn’s Picasso brings $41.5 million
Las Vegas titan Steve Wynn sold Picasso’s 1932 painting “Still Life with Tulips” at Sotheby’s on Thursday night for a robust sum of $41.5 million.
The last time the work was sold publicly was in 2000 at Christie’s New York, where it brought $28.6 million, but the winning bidder then was not believed to be Wynn.
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The painting--featuring a white, gold and green palette against a dark background--served as one of the few bright spots in Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and modern material in New York.
In a week marked by drops in the financial markets and disappointing sales (also lack of sales) at both of the big New York auction houses, Sotheby’s auction on Thursday brought only $163 million, a few million dollars short of what the firm projected and $36 million less than last November’s evening sale.
Still, Marie-Therese Walther remains the it-girl of the ultra-high-end art market. In his 1932 painting, “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” which set a record for the artist by selling for $106.5 million at Christie’s, Picasso pictured her in a state of voluptuous repose, with green leaves in the background mimicking her curves and a Grecian bust nearby echoing her facial features.
In “Still Life with Tulips” from the same feverish year, Picasso put a quasi-classical marble bust made in her image at the painting’s center, giving it a sort of cartoonish gigantism familiar to fans of the artist.
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