The market for Picassos may be about to turn

ARTISTS rarely create more than 5,000 works over a lifetime. Pablo Picasso, who died on Apr 8, 1973 at the age of 91, produced 25,000. Between 1950 and 2021 more than 1,500 notable Picassos were sold at auction in America and Britain, compared with 798 by the next-most-prolific artist, Andy Warhol, according to Sotheby’s Mei Moses, the art-data arm of the auction house. In its recent London sales, Sotheby’s offered a sculpture, an illustrated book, a cubist bronze cast, some gravure prints and several drawings and paintings, all by Picasso. Prices ranged from under £5,000 (S$8,219) to more than £18 million.

Since 1999, prices of Picasso’s works have grown twice as fast as the broader market for 20th-century art. The most expensive Picasso was sold for US$180 million, reportedly by a Saudi collector to a former prime minister of Qatar. But in the midst of what one commentator calls the “Picassopalooza” around the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death, dealers and auction houses are nervous that the long bull market may be about to turn.

One indication is Picasso’s waning influence on today’s creators. “It is artists, more than anyone, who propel artists of the past into the future,” says Ben Luke, a critic. Having interviewed dozens of them, young and old, for a podcast A Brush With…, he notes that few cite Picasso as an inspiration. “Marcel Duchamp, yes. Philip Guston, yes. Louise Bourgeois, often,” Luke says. That Picasso no longer features on that list is a “monumental shift”.