Picasso Sculpture Catalogue Raisonne

Fellow Appraiser Workshops reader  Darlene Bialowski sent me an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on Picasso's Granddaughter and her attempt to create a catalogue raisonne on his sculptures.

The article states that many scholars and dealers believe a catalogue raisonne on Picasso sculptures would add value to existing pieces as many of his sculptures are considered to be undervalued. Such a resource would bring additional transparency and  balance to the markets.

The Wall Street Journal reports (many times WSJ articles are behind a pay wall, you therefore may or may not be able to access the full article from the source link listed below)

Catalogue raisonnés log this kind of information, along with everything else scientifically knowable about the artworks created. Because these tomes are typically written and vetted by art scholars or family members in a position to vouch for the artist, catalogue raisonnés are also used to help confirm an artwork's authenticity—or even to shore up collector confidence in an artist overall. "For the trade, it's become a stamp of approval," said Véronique Wiesinger, director of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation. (See article below.)

Dealers say the financial implications of Ms. Widmaier-Picasso's findings could be huge because she is focusing on arguably the only undervalued segment of her grandfather's oeuvre, his sculptures. Picasso, the Spanish co-founder of cubism and painter of "Guernica," created roughly 50,000 works between 1881 and his death in 1973.

His most coveted paintings depict his mistresses, including "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust," which sold for $106.5 million—the second-highest price ever paid for an artist at auction, after the $120 million paid for Edvard Munch's "The Scream." Picasso's sculptures of jesters and roosters and sheet-metal portraits of pony-tailed girls aren't as well known or highly valued, though. Picasso's bronze record-holder is a 1941 bust of his mistress Dora Maar that sold at Sotheby's BID +0.19% six years ago for $29.1 million. But of his top 100 auction prices, only three are for sculptures, according to Artnet, a firm that tracks auctions. (By contrast, one of Alberto Giacometti's sculptures has topped $100 million.)

All that could change with the completion of Ms. Widmaier-Picasso's catalogue raisonné, said Carmen Gimenez, a curator with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum who previously ran the Museo Picasso Málaga in Spain. Ms. Gimenez said dealers and auctioneers are already leveraging Ms. Widmaier-Picasso's research into the artist's 1950s sheet-metal sculptures to remind collectors how rare these pieces are compared with his paintings.

Prices for these sculptures have started ticking upward as a result, dealers say. Three months ago, New York collector Donald Bryant paid Sotheby's $13.6 million for Picasso's 1954 painted-metal sculpture portrait of "Sylvette," a piece Ms. Widmaier-Picasso has written about in essays as well as in her catalogue raisonné. Six years earlier, auction houses couldn't get a third as much for any "Sylvette."

Source: Wall Street Journal