Katya Kazakina claimed a scoop last week in identifying (via Artnet) hedge-fund mogul/mega-collector Steve Cohen as the owner of Picasso‘s Femme Nue Couchée, 1932, a headliner for Sotheby’s May 17 Modern evening auction:
On April 7, two days before Katya’s “Couchée” coup, her Artnet colleague, Sarah Cascone, had reported that the “Reclining Nude” had been “held by the consignor since 2008.” Hmmm. The image looked so familiar. Now where had I seen it before?
Ah ha! Le voilà (on the right), featured in Acquavella Gallery’s 2008 show devoted to Picasso’s sensuous young lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. It was one of two works in the show that were owned by Cohen and identified as such:
When I perused that show, I had then been more interested in capturing “Le Rêve” (on the left)—the painting that Steve Wynn had famously (and clumsily) damaged with his elbow while showing it to Cohen, who had been viewing it as a prospective buyer. (Her left forearm, to my eyes, had been expertly restored before her Acquavella outing.)
Below is a better view of “Femme nue couchée” (center), as installed in the Acquavella exhibition. As I then wrote, the show had made me feel “queasy”—an indigestion triggered by the commingling in a commercial gallery of prestigious museum loans with privately owned works that could be conceivably be monetized. Among the works on display were examples from the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum and the Tate.
In its lot essay, Sotheby’s describes Marie-Thérèse as having “the strong and sensuous fin-like limbs of a sea-creature.” To me, she’s a cross between a femme fatale and a caricatured octopus (with breasts for eyes).
Although I was assured that nothing in Acquavella’s 2008 show was then for sale, the reclining nude is now up for grabs, estimated by Sotheby’s to sell for “in excess of $60 million,” perhaps giving Cohen some spare change to lavish on his new passion—the NY Mets.
Which brings me back to Kazakina, who addressed the issues raised by the nexus between nonprofit museums and profit-seeking collectors in her Apr. 8 Artnet post. She unpacked the “buy one, give one” (BOGO) gambit practiced by some dealers: Collectors sometimes get preferential access to purchase works by a hot artist by promising to give a comparable work to a museum, thereby adding luster to the gallery’s offerings. This mutually rewarding practice, she suggests, “blurs the lines between supposedly independent museums and the profit-driven art market.”
Are there any lines left to blur?
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