What have you got on your wall? I thought about this last week when I heard of the sale of artworks that had been hanging on the wall of a Las Vegas hotel. They were not just any old daubs, mind you, but nine pictures and two ceramic artworks by arguably the most important artist of the 20th century: Pablo Picasso.
Hung on the restaurant wall of the Bellagio Hotel, the artworks spanned more than 50 years of Picasso’s career, with the top price among them coming for the 1938 painting Woman in a Red-Orange Beret. Expected to fetch $20m-30m, it sold for a very encouraging $40.5m.
In fact, as a whole the consignment did rather better than hoped, totalling $110m.
That’s quite a wallful.
It reminded me, too, of the first great discovery on the Antiques Roadshow. Back in 1986, a couple in Barnstaple, Devon decided to show a painting that they had owned since 1930 to art expert Peter Nahum, one of the show’s specialists. They hadn’t thought it worth anything but were curious to find out more about it and, anyway, were taking their dog for a walk so thought they might as well drop in on the show which was filming in the town.
It transpired that it was the most important missing work by the Victorian artist Richard Dadd and dated to about 1845 – two years after he had killed his father in a mad frenzy. Titled The Halt in the Desert, it was painted while Dadd was detained in Broadmoor and shows a rather peaceful moonlit scene. The British Museum bought it for a large six-figure sum.
