Markets around the world are looking to China to buoy their financial prospects. So are art auction houses.
After a dismal year, Sotheby’s and Christie’s International PLC are set to begin a major round of art auctions in London on Tuesday, and experts say Chinese collectors may emerge as the latest power players to bid up [...]

A Christie’s employee looks at a 1963 painting entitled “Tete de femme (Jacqueline)” by Pablo Picasso on display at the auction house in London, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010. The painting is to be auction at ‘Impressionist and Modern Art’ sale on Feb. 2 with an estimated price of 3 to 4 million pounds (US$4.9 to [...]

In a crisp, 50-minute sale Wednesday that was choreographed for today’s tastes, Sotheby’s managed to sell more than $55 million worth of Impressionist and modern art. Though the auction featured just 27 lots, the smallest number of works in a comparable evening sale here since 1997, bidding was consistent, and a late Picasso fetched $11.5 [...]

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Mousquetaire à la pipe, oil on canvas, 57 5/8 x 35 1/8 in. (146.5 x 89.3 cm.)
Christie’s announced details of its Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on May 6, 2009. Comprised of 50 works from the great masters of the era, the sale presents a unique opportunity to collect rare [...]

Modern masterworks by celebrated artists including Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse will be featured in an upcoming University of Iowa Museum of Art (UIMA)-organized exhibition at the Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second St. in downtown Davenport, IA.

Jackson Pollock, “Mural,” 1943, oil on canvas, 8′ 1 1/4″ x 19′ 10″.
The exhibition, “A Legacy [...]

Kunstmuseum Basel presents today Pablo Picasso: Prints, on view through May 24, 2009. Pablo Picasso applied himself with great intensity to the specific possibilities of print techniques. From woodcuts and etchings to lithographs and linoleum cuts, he employed every known printing method with stupendous ease and mastery, developing complex mixed techniques and experimenting with polychrome [...]

Picasso was one of 20th-century art’s major makers and shapers. He was also one of its most prolific purveyors of kitsch. I would place a high percentage of his output in the kitsch category. That would include some of the dozen closely related paintings in the exhibition “Picasso’s ‘Marie-Thérèse’ ” at Acquavella Galleries, and for [...]