Ari Hodara bought his ticket at the weekend after finding out about the raffle by chance while dining out
A Parisian art enthusiast could not believe his luck when he found out on Tuesday he had won a Pablo Picasso painting worth more than €1m with a €100 raffle ticket.
“How do I check that it’s not a hoax?” said Ari Hodara, 58, after organisers called him following the draw at Christie’s auction house in the French capital.
Continue reading...Number of tickets to win Tête de Femme will be capped at 120,000 and proceeds will go to Alzheimer’s research
A raffle in France is offering the chance to win a portrait by Pablo Picasso for the price of a €100 (£87) ticket, with proceeds going to Alzheimer’s research.
Picasso painted the gouache-on-paper Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman) in 1941. The raffle organisers’ online sales platform says the number of tickets will be capped at 120,000, meaning the draw could net €12m if they are all sold.
Continue reading...Madrid and Basque government leaders call each other ‘provincial’ in dispute over the artwork
A row has broken out between the Madrid and Basque regional governments in Spain over the latter’s request for Guernica, probably Picasso’s most celebrated work, to be housed temporarily in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to mark the 90th anniversary of the bombing of the Basque town.
The work has hung in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid since 1992 and repeated requests for it to be moved to the Basque Country have been refused.
Continue reading...Piece by late South African artist Dumile Feni is part of new series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme
On the second floor of the Reina Sofía, in the very spot where Picasso’s Guernica was first exhibited when it arrived in the Madrid museum 34 years ago, there now hangs a smaller, near-namesake of the Spanish artist’s most famous work.
While African Guernica, which was drawn by the late South African artist Dumile Feni in 1967, may lack the scale of Picasso’s masterpiece, its depth, anger and unnerving juxtaposition of man and beast, light and dark, and innocence and cruelty, are every bit as disturbing.
Continue reading...Portrait of Dora Maar completed in Paris during war had been in private collection since being bought in 1944
A newly discovered painting by Pablo Picasso of the French photographer and painter Dora Maar completed during the German occupation of Paris that has not been seen for 80 years, has been unveiled.
The work, Bust of a Woman in a Flowery Hat (Dora Maar), was finished towards the end of the couple’s turbulent nine-year relationship and shows Maar in a softer, more colourful light than Picasso’s previous portraits of his then lover.
Continue reading...Art police and Pisa prosecutor say 38 people being investigated, with about 2,100 fake artworks seized
Italian police have dismantled a Europe-wide forgery network suspected of producing sophisticated replicas of works by some of the world’s most famous artists, including Banksy, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Gustav Klimt.
Thirty-eight people had been placed under investigation in Italy, Spain, France and Belgium on suspicion of conspiracy to handle stolen goods, forgery and illegal sale of artworks, Italy’s art police and Pisa’s prosecutor’s office said in a joint statement on Monday.
Continue reading...Big exhibition will reflect life and loves of artist, from his first professional print in 1904 to 1960s masterpieces
The British Museum is putting on a big exhibition of the print works of Pablo Picasso, one of the finest graphic artists of the 20th century, it will announce on Monday.
About 100 prints will reflect the life and loves of the artist with an extraordinary vision, best known for masterpieces include Guernica, one of the most powerful anti-war paintings.
Continue reading...Ian Katz says new show, Art Trouble, celebrates the channel’s tradition of ‘iconoclasm and irreverence’
Channel 4 has bought a painting by Adolf Hitler and will allow a studio audience to decide whether Jimmy Carr should burn it with a flamethrower.
As part of its latest season of programmes, the TV channel has bought artworks by a range of “problematic” artists, including Pablo Picasso, as well as convicted paedophile Rolf Harris and sexual abuser Eric Gill.
Continue reading...‘Deviant’ works by artists including Picasso and Warhol return to display at exhibition in Iranian capital
Some of the world’s most prized works of contemporary western art have been unveiled for the first time in decades in Tehran.
The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric, rails against the influence of the west. Authorities have condemned “deviant” artists for “attacking Iran’s revolutionary culture”. And the Islamic Republic has plunged further into confrontation with the US and Europe as it rapidly accelerates its nuclear programme and diplomatic efforts stall.
Continue reading...Show claiming to feature works by Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso abruptly cancelled as police launch investigation
An exhibition in Slovenia claiming to feature works by Picasso, Van Gogh and Matisse was abruptly cancelled this week over fears some works were forged, prompting a police probe on Friday.
The National Museum of Slovenia planned to officially open the show on Wednesday this week, entitled “Travels” and featuring 160 paintings owned by the little-known Boljkovac family.
Continue reading...Auction houses are recording a boom in sales after a return to pre-pandemic levels of supplies of works
As a straight return on investment, it’s hard to beat “Untitled”, a 1982 work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, the African American street artist who became a global cultural icon, featuring a horned African mask on an abstract background across a canvas almost 5m wide.
In 2004, the painting sold for $4.5m. Back on the market 12 years later, it fetched $57.3m, then a record for a Basquiat. This week, it went under the hammer in New York for $85m (£68m), including fees, to a buyer from Asia.
Continue reading...Newly opened archive of art patron’s papers reveals a previously unseen sketch for the surrealist work
One of the world’s best-known pieces of furniture, Salvador Dalí’s Mae West lips sofa, started life as a sketch on the back of an envelope, research in the archive of a Sussex country house has revealed.
The sketch was unearthed at West Dean near Chichester, the former home of Dalí’s patron Edward James, and experts say it reveals the extent to which James was involved in the creation of the 1930s sofa. Alongside the lobster telephone, also the result of a collaboration between Dalí and James, it is one of the emblems of the surrealist movement.
Continue reading...Sotheby’s to sell 11 works in Bellagio hotel and casino, in one of most valuable Picasso auctions yet
Las Vegas: the city of sin, where you can gamble away your savings, get married on a whim, dine on an octuple bypass burger at the Heart Attack Grill – and soon, it has been announced, take part in one of the most valuable Picasso auctions ever staged.
Sotheby’s has announced it is to sell 11 Picasso works owned by MGM Resorts, which have a combined value of about $100m (£72m).
Continue reading...Agustín Ibarrola’s 1977 version was painted as part of campaign to get the original returned from New York
The grief-snapped mother is still there, cradling her dead child 84 years on, as is the fallen soldier with his stigmata and the horse with its silent screams.
However, the Guernica now on its way to a museum in the Basque country is not Pablo Picasso’s monochrome howl of anti-fascist fury but a retelling of the work intended to help bring the original to the market town whose agonies beneath waves of German and Italian bombers inspired its creation – and to denounce the subsequent horrors of the Franco dictatorship.
Continue reading...A Picasso painting stolen nine years ago from Greece's National Gallery and recovered by police has had yet another mishap after the valuable artwork slipped and fell from its display. Police were exhibiting the recovered painting - along with a Mondrian piece from 1905 - when it slipped from its display. It was hastily returned to its position by an official not wearing gloves. The paintings were stolen in 2012 and recovered after they were found hidden in bushland
Works by 20th-century masters found nearly a decade after audacious heist at Athens gallery
A Picasso gifted to the Greek people by the artist in honour of their resistance to Nazi rule has been found in a gorge after a builder admitted to stealing the masterpiece and two other artworks in an audacious heist from the National Gallery in Athens nearly a decade ago.
For nine years, Head of a Woman had lain hidden in the home of the self-described art lover alongside Stammer Windmill, a work by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, also stolen during the overnight raid on 9 January 2012.
Continue reading...A book of family memories paints the artist as doting dad, rather than the callous, ageing womaniser depicted by others
Pablo Picasso was still married to the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova when he became captivated by a 17-year-old girl outside the Galeries Lafayette in Paris in 1927.
He was 28 years her senior, but Marie-Thérèse Walter soon became his muse for voluptuous portraits and gave birth to his daughter before he moved on to the next of his many relationships, with Dora Maar, the surrealist photographer and painter.
Continue reading...€100 ticket scoops ‘incredible’ 1921 still life oil painting by Spanish master
An Italian accountant whose son bought her a raffle ticket as a Christmas present won a Pablo Picasso oil painting valued at €1m ($1.1m) in a charity draw on Wednesday.
Claudia Borgogno summed up her amazement in one word: incredible. “I have never won anything before,” said the 58-year-old told from Ventimiglia, in north-western Italy.
Continue reading...Timothy Sammons used works by Picasso and Chagall as collateral for personal loans
A prominent British art dealer who defrauded his clients out of millions by using a scheme that involved masterpieces by artists including Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall has been sentenced for up to 12 years in prison.
Timothy Sammons – a former Sotheby’s specialist who had offices in New York and London and who brokered multimillion-pound deals for the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – used art that did not belong to him as collateral to obtain personal loans between 2010 and 2015.
Continue reading...For years, a giant brass and Sèvres porcelain grasshopper that could, if needed, double as a wine-cooler sat outside the royal apartments at Windsor Castle; a gift from French president Georges Pompidou to the Duke of Edinburgh during a state visit to France in 1972.
Across the Channel, an hour from Paris, the home of its late creator François-Xavier Lalanne and his artist wife Claude is full of such wonderful and whimsical creatures: a huge rhinoceros that transforms into a desk; a bronze cabbage on chicken legs; a herd of sheep that can be sat on, tables of enormous ginkgo leaves.
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