second institutional structure
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
The history of modern art of Russia, contemporary painting of Russia
Post-Soviet (modern) Russian painting
The variety of contrasts combines the face of modern art in Russia. The beginning of the 21st century is a kind of transitional moment in the history of art, when a process of rethinking the artistic heritage is taking place and lines for the further development of the visual arts are outlined. We live in a period when not only the life of the past generation gets rid of itself, but also as a result the spiritual component changes. People and their thoughts are going through a kind of renewal, and all this is the threshold of a new era. Continue reading
