Brody living room featuring Picasso, via Art Newspaper

Did you know that one of the biggest 20th century art deals took place in the early 1930s, amid the crippling Great Depression?

As a major Picasso comes up for sale next week at Christie’s, my new Art Newspaper column examines a counter-intuitive phenomenon: how record auction prices are achieved in lousy financial times.

From the Art Newspaper…

The reign of Alberto Giacometti’s emaciated Walking Man I as the world’s priciest trophy at auction is likely to be short-lived. The six-foot tall bronze, which fetched an outsized $104.3m in February at Sotheby’s, London, is expected to be overtaken by a painting of Picasso’s lusty, lilac-hued mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, coming up for sale on 4 May at Christie’s, New York.

The 1932 Nude, Green Leaves and Bust bears the largest pre-sale auction estimate in history: an “on request only” $70m to $90m. But dealers say the painting may well hammer down for over $100m. It is from the same series as casino owner Steve Wynn’s celebrated Le Rêve, also 1932, which was sold to hedge fund manager Steve Cohen in 2006 for $139m, before Wynn accidentally plunged his elbow through the canvas and called off the deal. Christie’s painting has a third-party guarantor, so someone, somewhere, has locked in a bid for at least $70m.

If the Picasso performs as expected, it will be the second time in four months—amid a painful global recession—that the record for a work at auction is smashed. Until the Giacometti sale, the previous record, Sotheby’s sale of Picasso’s sensitive Boy with a Pipe, 1905, in 2004 for $104.1m, had lasted for six years, through a boom. Now, as the recession drags on, experts predict another record sale. How could this be?

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