Pablo Picasso
Fifty thousand works across seventy-five years, in every medium there is — which makes identification the whole job.
No twentieth-century artist left more to value. The output runs to something like fifty thousand works: paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, ceramics, book illustration and textiles, made continuously from the 1890s to 1973. That volume is the defining commercial fact. It means a Picasso can be a nine-figure painting or a few hundred pounds' worth of unsigned book plate, and the distance between those is settled by identification rather than by the name on the label.
The ceramics are where most owners are surprised in both directions. Between 1947 and 1971 Picasso worked with the Madoura pottery at Vallauris on editions that run from twenty-five to five hundred, catalogued by Alain Ramié. These are genuine works, they carry the Madoura and Edition Picasso stamps on the base, and they are neither the one-offs some owners hope for nor the souvenirs others assume. Unique pieces exist alongside them and are a different market again. The base is where the answer is, which is why a photograph of the underside is the first thing we ask for.
The prints are the other large field, catalogued by Bloch and by Baer. The Vollard Suite, the Sueño y Mentira de Franco, the late erotic etchings of the 1960s: what decides value there is the edition, the paper and its watermark, whether an impression was pulled in the artist's lifetime, and whether it is signed. Posthumous printings and restrikes circulate widely and are legitimate objects sold honestly and misdescribed objects sold otherwise.
Above all of it sits the authentication question. The Picasso Administration in Paris, run by the artist's heirs, controls attribution and reproduction rights, and its opinion is the one that matters — no significant work moves without addressing it. Drawings in particular are heavily forged, and the market has been dealing with fakes since Picasso's own lifetime, when he was known to authenticate and disown work by turns.
At auction
- Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O)$179.4m
- Oil on canvas, 1955 · Christie's, New York · 11 May 2015
- Christie's, as widely reported
- Then the highest price paid for any work of art at auction.
- Nude, Green Leaves and Bust$106.5m
- Oil on canvas, 1932 · Christie's, New York · 4 May 2010
- Christie's, as widely reported
- Painted in a single day, and one of the Marie-Thérèse Walter pictures of that year.
- Garçon à la pipe$104.2m
- Oil on canvas, 1905 · Sotheby's, New York · 5 May 2004
- Sotheby's, as widely reported
- The first work of art to pass $100m at auction.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Selling a work
We represent the seller rather than the auction house: comparing houses and sale dates, negotiating the seller's terms, and keeping the paperwork and remittance in your name. What sets the value of a Pablo Picasso sets out what we look at first.