No old master is more masterly than Leonardo da Vinci. His Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. And yet his oeuvre is small, no more than 15 works, some unfinished and all fragile. The rest is notebooks and legendry. He was supposed to be charming and eloquent, a wonderful singer and [...]

It’s 1912, and Pablo Picasso is in Paris, thinking: All right, what’s next? A few years earlier he painted a killer picture, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” People had thrown up their hands in alarm; his friends hardly knew what to say. Energized by the fuss, he punched out variations on the theme: paintings of sharp-elbowed, wood-brown [...]

A Christie’s employee poses with a 1905 painting ‘Bateaux a Collioure’ by Andre Derain on display at the auction house in London. The painting, last seen in public in 1965, sold at an Impressionist and Modern Art sale on Feb. 9 for £5,865,250 ($9,460,648). A painting by Paul Gauguin, billed as the top lot at [...]

Seven months after the gavel came down at Sotheby’s in London, declaring the Getty Museum its proud buyer — for $44.9 million –- a prized 1839 painting by J.M.W. Turner is indeed finally “sold” and headed to Brentwood, where the museum expects to display it by the end of February. An agent for the Getty [...]