BOY WITH A TUBE by Pablo Picasso

The most expensive painting in the world?
In 2004, at an Sotheby’s auction, an unknown buyer acquired the work of Pablo Picasso “Boy with a Pipe” (Garson and la Pipe) in 1905 for $ 104.168 million. The starting price of work – 70 million dollars – an unprecedented amount for the art market. The high cost of the work is explained, firstly, by the impeccable provenance of the painting, and secondly, by its uniqueness: Picasso’s early works appear on the market extremely rarely, almost all the pictures of the pink and blue periods are in museum collections.
The Boy with the Pipe was written in 1905, when the artist lived and worked, and very successfully, in Paris. Nevertheless, on Picasso’s “creative calendar” this period is the earliest, pre-subist and, by the way, the most valuable. The canvas belongs to the rare for any master category of iconic paintings: it marked the artist’s transition from the “blue” period to the “pink” period. Continue reading →