Picasso on show at the Tate

"And how different would the art galleries of the world be today if the painstaking Jan Vermeer had lived to be ninety-one and the over-prolific Pablo Picasso had dies at thirty-nine , instead of the other way round"

Niall Ferguson, historian

Here is the good news for all Picasso lovers:

The most expensive painting to be sold at auction, Pablo Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust," goes on public display in Britain for the first time on Monday at the Tate Modern gallery in London.
The 1932 work, which sold for $106.5 million at Christie's in New York last year, has been lent to the Tate galleries from a private collection and will be on display in a new Pablo Picasso room in the Poetry and Dream section.
"Nude, Green Leaves and Bust is one of the sequence of paintings of Picasso's muse, Marie-Therese Walter, made by the artist at Boisgeloup, Normandy, in the early months of 1932," said Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director.
"They are widely regarded as amongst his greatest achievements of the inter-war period."

And here is the bad news:
Well, I am not planning to go and see the painting. For the following reason:
Watch closely the video below - the third man from the right with the black mobile phone was my agent at the auction. I had ordered him to bid up to $110 million, but the poor man had to go to the loo just when the much lower bid was accepted. I was of course not at all amused. As a matter of fact I was furious. But what could I do?

So now I hope you understand why I can live without never again seeing one of the greatest achievments of 20th century art.

Seriously speaking, I would not contemplate travelling to London in order to see the Picasso "masterpiece" because I happen to agree with the opinion of the Scottish artist and poet Dee Rimbaud:

"I think Picasso was mightily over-rated.  Sure, he was a brilliant draftsman and his early work was powerful, but he wasn't the innovator that he's made out to be.  I think he jumped on every bloody bandwagon going, and he picked up a lot of the credit because of his technical expertise.  Once the market men got their hooks into Picasso they weren't going to let go and see the value of their investments diminish, so, it didn't matter what Picasso produced, it was always hailed as brilliant.  The guy was an art factory, knocking out up to three paintings a day.  I don't know about you, but something that requires so little effort has little value to me.  You know what I think about Picasso's middle period, it was kind of soul-less.  As for his later work, the senile ravings of an embittered old man: ugly, without the redemption of any real intensity." 

PS
For those of you interested in what is good and not so good in art, I would like to recommend one of my previous posts.

PS 2
It has now been revealed that my "competitor" at the auction was, not surprisingly, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich - you know the guy who owns a football team and a couple of smallish yachts. Roman´s flat in London is currently being repainted, and with no place for the Picasso at home, he offered it to the Tate.