Category: Bloomberg

There is an invisible, you might even say conceptual, addition to Pablo Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust.” An enormous price tag reading “$106.5 million” might as much be hanging on the wall beside it.

That figure will be present in the minds of those contemplating it at London’s Tate Modern, where the piece has gone on public display for the first time in decades.

For this is the work that fetched the highest sum ever bid at auction (on May 4 last year at Christie’s International, New York). Or, more simply, as I overheard a group of visitors telling each other, “this is the world’s most expensive painting!”

Of course, that is by no means the same thing as the world’s best. It is evidence that at least two people (the successful bidder, and the under-bidder), liked it a lot.

Previously, it was in the collection of Sidney and Frances Brody of Los Angeles, who bought it in 1951. It had been on public exhibition just once, in 1961. Now its new, anonymous owner has loaned it for about two years to Tate, starting from this week.

So how does “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” hold up? Well, it is a fine Picasso. This is a grandly opulent picture, the product of the artist’s erotic obsession with his mistress Marie-Therese Walter. Her naked body reclines in front of her own sculpted bust, the fruit on a plate in front rhyming visually with her breasts.

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The Royal Academy has redeemed itself.

“Modern British Sculpture,” an exhibition that opened there in January, is eccentric, sprawling and hard to comprehend (I’m still trying to work out what Queen Victoria is doing in the middle of it). “Watteau: The Drawings” is the opposite: wisely selected, perfectly mounted and crammed with beautiful things, it’s just about the best show of the year so far in London.

Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was among the greatest of French painters. Indeed, a good deal of what you might think of as characteristically French in art — lightness, elegance, grace, a bittersweet sense of life — begins with him.

Right from the beginning, Watteau’s drawings — almost 90 are on display in the show — have been considered the best of his work. He had an amazing ability, using red, black and white chalks to catch the subtle nuances of things: a glance, the fall of a woman’s dress, a gesture, the gleam of a naked body. In a few strokes of chalk, he could show you not just what something looked like, but how it felt.

It seems he drew in a sketchbook constantly, and without any particular picture in mind. When he came to make a painting, he selected from this image bank, sometimes years after making the drawing. It long has been believed that when he was received into the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, a category of art had to be invented to describe what he did, the “fete galante.” There’s a scholarly disagreement as to whether that’s true. It doesn’t change the fact that most of Watteau’s pictures are of people hanging around outdoors doing nothing specific.

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Arguably, the two most celebrated U.S. visual artists of the 20th century were not Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock, but Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell.

In his heyday, Rockwell (1894-1978) had what every artist dreams: an audience of millions, instantly, for each new work.

For almost half a century, from 1916 to 1963, Rockwell was the cover artist at “The Saturday Evening Post.” All 323 of the Post covers he produced during those years are hung in a new exhibition, “Norman Rockwell’s America” at the Dulwich Picture Gallery together with an array of his oil paintings and studies.

At the time, this was mass-media stuff. The Post was selling to 3.3 million households at its peak in the 1940s — then the largest magazine circulation in history, according to the exhibition catalog. Rockwell presented an image of the U.S. that’s both instantly recognizable and gloriously unfashionable.

His nation is small town, folksy, cheery, sentimental, middle class, wholesome, family orientated, heterosexual and patriotic. During World War II he produced a number of propaganda posters, including “Freedom From Want” (1943) in which grandparents place an enormous roast turkey on the family table.

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Nonagenarians just aren’t what they used to be.

The start of one’s 10th decade used to be a moment for seriously slowing down. The great pianist, composer and bandleader Dave Brubeck, who celebrates his 90th birthday on Dec. 6, has marked the occasion by playing a short season at the Blue Note club in New York, and winning the poll in Downbeat magazine for “Jazz Group of the Year.”

“Isn’t that something?” he exclaimed when I talked to him last week. This must be a record: It’s 60 years since Brubeck and his band first won a Downbeat Poll. What’s his secret? He obviously just loves playing music. That’s clear from the BBC Arena documentary, “In His Own Sweet Way,” coproduced by Clint Eastwood (broadcast tonight on BBC Four. Jamie Cullum’s Radio 2 show features an interview with Brubeck on Dec. 7.)

“The worst thing about the life of a jazz musician on the road is getting to the gig,” Brubeck says in the phone interview. “Once you’re there and playing, it’s marvelous. I played two concerts last weekend, and they both went wonderfully. I hadn’t played for three months with my group. It was the greatest feeling to be back.”

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The age of austerity has been a jolly time for the art world, so far at least.

For Picasso, the year brought a record price for any work of art at auction when his 1932 painting “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” sold for $106.5 million at Christie’s International in New York in May. It’s a fine work, though some, including his biographer John Richardson, prefer “Nude in Black Armchair,” which the artist painted the following day (March 9, 1932).

As a reward for one day’s work, $106.5 million may be a record in itself, although admittedly Picasso would have had to reach the age of 128, and kept hold of the picture, to reap it. Still, he may posthumously be experiencing some satisfaction.

Giacometti, on the other hand, might have been miffed by his own prices. His bronze sculpture “Walking Man I” fetched the equivalent of $103.4 million at Sotheby’s in London on Feb. 3 — only just missing the world record of $104.2 million, for a Picasso, in 2004. An austere man who worked and lived in a tiny Paris apartment with an earth floor, Giacometti was intensely competitive with Picasso.

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