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Over the past half century, Pablo Picasso’s reputation has taken quite a beating. Once termed a “genius” by fellow Cubist Georges Braque and later a “prodigy” by his biographer John Richardson, Picasso was called a “walking scrotum” in Robert Hughes’s 1991 history of modern art. In 2019 he was even labeled an “egoist” by artist Françoise Gilot, who ended their tumultuous decade-long relationship and then chronicled it in a 1964 memoir that was recently reprinted. The shift owes something to feminists like Linda Nochlin, who, in a well-known 1971 ARTnews essay, asked if Picasso would have been called a genius...

Modernism is a reactionary culture, a fact that I demonstrated by pointing in detail to the works of a dozen leading Modernist figures including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Pablo Picasso, and others. In all of these writers and artists, there was a similar rejection of all that is truly modern: a democratic capitalist society in which ordinary citizens seek freedom and opportunity for themselves and their families, including economic, religious, and political liberty.

The legal heirs of a German Jewish banker who was forced to sell his art collection to avoid persecution by the Nazis are suing a Japanese holding company to reclaim ownership of a painting by Vincent van Gogh. Three heirs of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, based in New York and Germany, filed a lawsuit on December 13 in an Illinois district court against Sompo Holdings, an insurance company based in Japan, to dispute its legal title to the painting Sunflowers (1888). The claim states that Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was a “casualty” of Nazi-era policies and economic sanctions that forced him to sell his...

A missing Pablo Picasso painting was spotted at the home of the Philippines’ controversial former first lady — as she celebrated her son’s presidential victory, according to a former official familiar with the artwork. Imelda Marcos — the widow of late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos — was filmed hugging her son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., in footage that aired this week with the apparent long-lost masterpiece “Reclining Woman VI” hanging on a wall behind them. The bombshell in the background was broadcast in a news segment by the local station TV Patrol Tuesday after Marcos Jr. became the country’s next...

BARCELONA - A professor from a Barcelona art school has staged a protest at a museum dedicated to Pablo Picasso intending to shed light on the Spanish painter's sometimes callous behaviour towards women. Maria Llopis and seven of her female students appeared at the Picasso Museum wearing t-shirts that read "Picasso, women abuser" and others that referred to Dora Maar, a French artist who is believed to have suffered abuse by Picasso during their relationship in the 1930s and 1940s. The protest last week echoed the global debate on men's treatment of women, led by the #MeToo movement, which includes...

An oil painting by Pablo Picasso sold for $103.4 million at a Christie's auction in New York, smashing its presale estimate of $55 million. The portrait of Picasso's French lover Marie-Therese, "Femme assise près d'une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse)", or 'Woman sitting near a window,' led the '20th Century Evening Sale' on Thursday. Keith Gill, head of the Impressionist and Modern Art department at Christie's London, said the work may be familiar to art lovers from its appearance at a landmark Picasso 1932 exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2018. "It's an incredibly iconic image. It hasn't been seen up at auction...

Philip Stapleton was perusing a thrift sale in the U.K. when he came across a painting he liked so much, he spent nearly $300 on it, even though he assumed it was fake. But after doing some research and talking to experts, the 52-year-old antique collector may have made the purchase of a lifetime – an original work by Pablo Picasso. Stapleton said that he spent 230 British pounds ($293), even though he believed to be fake because he "loved the picture," SWNS reports. Acting on a whim, Stapleton took it Brighton and Hove Auction House, where he received the...

Philip Stapleton was perusing a thrift sale in the U.K. when he came across a painting he liked so much, he spent nearly $300 on it, even though he assumed it was fake. But after doing some research and talking to experts, the 52-year-old antique collector may have made the purchase of a lifetime – an original work by Pablo Picasso. Stapleton said that he spent $293, even though he believed it to be fake because he "loved the picture," SWNS reports. Acting on a whim, Stapleton took it to Brighton and Hove Auction House, where he received the potentially...

New York City's spring art auctions get underway Tuesday with exceptional pieces by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Vincent Van Gogh and others whose work continues to fuel a robust market for impressionist, modern and contemporary art. Picasso's "Women of Algiers (Version O)," estimated to bring over $140 million, is poised to become the most expensive artwork sold at auction, while Giacometti's "Pointing Man" could set an auction record for a sculpture if bidding soars to an expected $130 million.

A treasure trove of artworks worth almost £1billion seized by the Nazis and reportedly destroyed in RAF bombing raids during WW2 has been found behind rotting food in shabby apartment in Munich. Experts have hailed the discovery of the 1,500 pictures, thought to have been lost or bombed, as a sensational find. The story of the lost masterpieces of such painters as Pablo Picasso, Renoir, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall is revealed in this week's edition of Germany's Focus magazine which broke the story of the incredible find by customs officials. Art historians examining the collection claim up to 300...

Officials at the Menil Collection don't know why a man spray-painted Pablo Picasso's "Woman in a Red Armchair" at the museum, but the act wasn't caught just on surveillance cameras. It also was captured by a bystander with a smartphone camera and subsequently posted on YouTube with a caption naming the alleged perpetrator as a young artist... The damaged artwork, with the spray paint barely dry, was rushed down the hall to the museum's conservation lab, where chief conservator Brad Epley quickly began its repair. The 1929 painting, one of nine by Picasso owned by the Menil, has "an excellent...

NEW YORK (Reuters)- Picasso's 1941 portrait of his mistress, "Dora Maar with cat," sold for an astounding $95 million at Sotheby's on Wednesday, becoming the second most expensive painting in auction history. The vibrant, large-scale work depicts Maar, the surrealist photographer Picasso was romantically involved with for a decade, seated in a chair with a small cat perched on the back. It had been expected to sell for upwards of $40 million, but the winning bid of $95,216,000, including commission, caught even Sotheby's officials by surprise. "I was hoping for 70-plus," said David Norman, Sotheby's co-chair of Impressionist and modern...

He was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and also one of the most controversial. And now, 33 years after his death, the first significant exhibition of Pablo Picasso's work in South Africa has provoked a furious row after a senior government official accused him of stealing the work of African artists to boost his "flagging talent". The Picasso and Africa exhibition, which has been drawing capacity crowds at Johannesburg's Standard Bank Gallery, contains 84 original works by Picasso along with 29 African sculptures similar to those in the artist's own collection, and is described as an...