Say Whaaaa Wednesday... Naked bodies, Two Dimension and $100 Million Dollars

Don’t you love when people who are dead are still racking in the dough? Last night, Pablo Picasso’s painting Nude, Green Leaves and Bust set a world record when it sold at a New York auction for $106.5 million dollars, making it the most expensive piece of art ever sold in history.

The portrait was painted in 1932 and depicts the artist’s lover, Marie-Therese Walter, a woman 30 years his junior and mother of his daughter. Although the picture appears to be serene with the nude Marie-Therese reclining in a wakeful bliss, the relationship between Picasso and Walter was anything but idyllic. Picasso’s rapport with this younger woman has been said to be fueled by secretiveness, taboos and limitless sexual boundaries. Marie-Therese was believed to be seen as an obedient object to Picasso. Their relationship continued throughout the years but took a toll on both Walter and Picasso. In 1973, just days before Picasso’s death, Marie-Therese hung herself in her garbage.

Now enough on the pathetic fallacy conjured up by art critics. Cubism is really appealing to me; I find its two dimensional surface of certain objects and sceneries to be quite successful in rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective and modeling. I always thought pure imitation was rather mundane, almost too similar to a photograph or of a naturalistic scene I am able to envision without creative thought. Cubists present a new reality free from the constraints of customary texture, space and color. However I do understand the critique of such contemporary art; it does have less merit in the technical aspect of painting, but that raises the question of what type of credentials are assigned to a piece of art that makes it art. Should a painting that took two years to create be more significant than one that took fifteen minutes? I am not sure. I enjoy looking at either one and don’t feel I need to create certain standards based on the technical merit and time it took to create the piece. One thing is for certain; I’d paint anything and everything anyone would want if I knew it would be sold for over $100 million dollars.