A $40 million Pablo Picasso painting from the artist’s Cubist period will hit the block at Sotheby’s this May during the marquee New York auctions.
Part of a cache of works from the collection of late Surrealist artist Enrico Donati and his wife Adele, who died last year, Arlequin (Buste), from 1909, is likely to be one of the most expensive works by Picasso sold during the marquee sales this season. It features a harlequin that appears to emerge from a cascade of three-dimensional geometric forms.
The auction house said on Monday that the work was valued within “the region of $40 million,” suggesting that it has increased dramatically in monetary worth since Enrico bought it for around $12,000 in the 1940s. He purchased it through Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, one of Picasso’s most famous dealers, having become enamored of the piece upon seeing it at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.
It’s the second high-profile attempt by Sotheby’s to sell Arlequin, which made its way to market at the auction house in 2008, not long after Enrico died. Then valued at more than $30 million, the painting was unexpectedly withdrawn just a week before a November Impressionist and modern art auction by Sotheby’s, which stated only that the work would not make it to the block for “private reasons.”
At the time, according to the New York Times, Sotheby’s was selling the work without a guarantee, an agreement that entitles the seller to a sum whether or not the work finds a buyer. Christie’s, the house’s main rival, reportedly offered the Donati estate a guarantee, plus “other types of financing.” But the work headed to Sotheby’s, anyway, with the stipulation that its consignor could remove it from auction.
This time, the painting has a guarantee and an irrevocable bid, a Sotheby’s spokesperson told ARTnews. The painting heads to sale in an auction of modern art on May 19.
Thirteen other works from the Donati collection are also headed to auction at Sotheby’s, including two more paintings that will appear in the May 19 sale. The first, a 1925 Wassily Kandinsky abstraction called Rote Tiefe (Red Depth), has a $12 million–$18 million estimate. The second, a 1939 Yves Tanguy work titled Aux Aguets le jour, has a $800,000–$1.2 million estimate.
Meanwhile, an untitled Alexander Calder stabile with a high estimate of $1 million is coming to a May 20 day sale of modern art, and two masks—one by a Yup’ik or Inupiaq artist, the other by a Bete-Guro artist, both from the 19th century—will be auctioned in a June 18 sale for art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
