The New York Times reported “a medley of whoops, hollers and gasps” when the gavel came down on Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O, 1955) at Christie’s Monday evening. At a final price of $179.4 million, the Picasso edged above (to the tune of $37 million) the previous art-auction record, Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud.
Clearly there were many factors in play during last night’s sale, but what is certain is that Picasso’s art-historical significance endures and there is room for plentiful new scholarship on this artist to come. A quick survey of UC Press’s list yields a bevy of fascinating books on Picasso—the most expensive of which can be added to your own shelves for a mere 0.00000033 percent of the price of Les Femmes d’Alger.
Be sure to check out:
- Charles Palermo’s forthcoming Modernism and Authority: Picasso and His Milieu around 1900
- Jane Daggett Dillenberger and John Handley’s The Religious Art of Pablo Picasso
- Rudolf Arnheim’s classic The Genesis of a Painting: Picasso’s Guernica
- Roland Penrose’s “enthralling” biography Picasso: His Life and Work
- Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch’s Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History
- Temma Kaplan’s Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso’s Barcelona
- Peter Read’s Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory
- Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Cubist Painters
If you’re inclined to purchase any of these titles, add 30% off to your savings with code 15W2142 at checkout.
