Today Art Market Monitor's Marion Maneker spotted this snapshot of embattled mogul Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendi at the April Gagosian exhibition "Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: Amour Fou" in the gallery's Facebook album.

Mrs. Murdoch is an investor in the "Pandora for art" start-up Art.sy, which Larry Gagosian advises. But her most recent appearance on the art scene (on July 16, while Rome burned) was the Hamptons screening of "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," hosted by rival Pace Gallery.

The painting pictured above depicts Picasso's decade-long muse and lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, to whom the Gagosian exhibition was devoted.

Jerry Saltz wrote of Walter:

Not only was she his submissive sexual conquest, artistic muse, psychic victim, and mother of his daughter; she’s the fleshy subject of some of his juiciest paintings. Picasso said she saved his life. And it’s true that from the moment she appears in his work, in early 1927, his art gets plusher and more immediate, catapulting him out of Cubism, paving the way for all his subsequent efforts. Marie-Thérèse is the fertile inspiration that made Picasso Picasso after Cubism.around the artist's

Picasso was 45 when he picked up the 17-year-old Walter with the line, "I am Picasso."

Mr. Murdoch was 66 when  met his third wife in Hong Kong in 1997. She was 29.

Last week I wrote about the Picasso market, specifically with regard to the increased interest in works featuring his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. Yesterday Christie’s London held the auction referenced in that piece (the Impressionist and Modern Sale) and the star Marie-Thérèse, Jeune fille endormie, sold under hammer for 13.5 million pounds, over a high estimate of 12 million. The painting was sold by the University of Sydney, which obtained it through a donation and will use the funds for scientific research.

It actually wasn’t the most expensive painting sold at the auction. That honor went to a depiction of the artist’s next lover, Dora Maar, so if you have an extra twenty million dollars or so lying around, now may be the time to invest in those!

Updated, 10:30 a.m. to include sale roundup.

Donald Judd (2011) at David Zwirner.

While much of New York’s art world is away on a European grand tour—starting with the Venice Biennale, moving on to Art Basel, the annual art fair in Switzerland, which opens next week, and winding up in London for a round of auctions—a handful of museum-worthy exhibitions make this a good time to visit Chelsea’s galleries. Artists on view through June include both past masters (Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Tatlin, Donald Judd) and living legends (Jasper Johns, John Chamberlain).

If you are interested in the spectacle of powerful men having affairs—and judging from the recent media attention given to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Weiner, who isn’t?—it’s worth visiting Gagosian’s “Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou.”

This focused glimpse into the private lives of a famous man and his young, secret lover is curated by the couple’s granddaughter, the art historian Diana Widmaier Picasso (along with Picasso scholar John Richardson). It is a story of a very private arrangement told through 80 Picasso paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs.

The exhibition begins with photos of Marie-Thérèse Walter, a confident, sunny 17-year-old French girl. Picasso saw her on the street in 1927, when the already-famous artist was 45 and married to Ballets Russes star Olga Khokhlova. “I am Picasso,” he said to Marie-Thérèse. His name meant nothing to her, but she said later that she found him charming.

In snapshots of Marie-Thérèse taken in Monte Carlo and Chamonix, we recognize the blonde bob and Grecian nose of one of the great Picasso faces: the crescent profile of the women in Guernica, the female figure in many of his best works.

Their affair lasted for over a dozen years, with Picasso arranging for his lover to be near his family at all times. But it began as a secret even from their friends, and remained so, to a certain extent, even after Marie-Thérèse had their child in 1935. When people would catch a glimpse of the girl, he’d call her the gardener’s daughter.

In Nue endormie (1932) and Nu couché (1932), charcoal-on-canvas sketches of a sleeping Marie-Thérèse, undulating lines trace her body. In early paintings she is abstracted, her figure broken down into geometric shapes; in others she is shown with lips sewn shut, or reduced to a set of initials on a vase: a cryptic monogram hidden in plain view.

This show has a tension that derives from placing intimate matters on display. That their relationship was clandestine, that Gagosian keeps the lights so low, and that many of the works come from private collections creates a frisson of voyeurism: Picasso may have made these works to be seen, but seeing them in this context we feel we are getting a peek at something that wasn’t meant to be shown.

In paintings and drawings of Marie-Thérèse such as Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge (1932) and La sieste (1932), Picasso drew attention to her breasts and pudenda. Judging by the number of sculptures in this show, he clearly enjoyed representing her voluptuous body in three dimensions. (One  Picasso catalogue notes dryly that the artist’s wife, Olga, a dancer, was flat-chested). Yet in his work, Marie-Thérèse also becomes an allegory for eternal youth, her skin rendered in lilac and a range of pinks. She is girlish even when most womanly, e.g., even when pictured nursing their daughter, Maya: while her nipples are depicted protruding pertly from her swollen breasts, her daughter might be a toy in her arms.

Most of all, Marie-Thérèse provided an endless site of experimentation for Picasso: sometimes she appears in electric, fauvist colors; other times the palette is muted; sometimes her figure is painted thickly and sometimes she is rendered by a single line; sometimes she is dressed up as the bride she would never become, Sleeping, thinking, reading, playing with dolls, nursing, Marie-Thérèse is a paradise of seemingly uncomplicated sexual and artistic fulfillment.

Some might consider Picasso a pederast for taking up with a girl not yet of the French age of consent. Yet he paints himself as the wounded minotaur. In Minotaure blessé et Naîade (1938), he is a love-sick boy or Humbert Humbert, the victim of his passion for a young girl. And yet, to hear him tell it, this passion is what restored him: he said at one point that meeting Marie-Thérèse saved his life.

In a film loop composed of old photographs, she seems happy, entertained by the adoration of Picasso’s camera, a model for only one pair of eyes.

The Gagosian exhibition is tightly focused: it omits Dora Maar, whom Picasso was seeing concurrently with Marie-Thérèse, as well as Françoise Gilot, his much-younger mistress through much of the 1940’s. Also missing is the postscript: his marriage to Jacqueline Roque in the 1960’s after his divorce from Olga in the 1950’s. (Roque, like Marie-Thérèse, took her own life after Picasso died.) It’s a show of strategic omissions and extraordinary visceral pleasures—a fitting framework for an affair.

It was not Picasso’s dreamy Marie-Thérèse paintings, but his cubist guitars that inspired the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin when Tatlin encountered them in Paris in 1914.

Shafrazi gallery’s exhibition of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1915-20) is dedicated to the dynamic architectural model of one of the most famous unbuilt buildings of the 20th century, on view for the first time in the United States.

Tatlin’s original 16-foot model was destroyed in 1932. The electric-powered piece at Shafrazi is a (rather disappointing) Swedish 1960’s scale reconstruction, albeit one with an impressive pedigree: it was built under the supervision of Tatlin’s original collaborator.

The 1,300-foot-tall behemoth this lost Constructivist curiosity anticipated ran into engineering problems and steel shortages and was never realized. Yet the utopian piece loomed large in the collective imagination of American artists of the 1960’s: during his lifetime the minimalist Dan Flavin, known for his fluorescent light tube sculptures, assembled 39 homages to Tatlin’s tower.

At Shafrazi, gears grind wearily, turning stacked geometric shapes intended to house branches of the Communist government. (The original model was operated by a small boy, hidden from view, turning a hand-crank.) The surrounding scaffolding is one part Eiffel tower and two parts vintage roller coaster. The structure is set at an improbable angle corresponding to the axis of the earth’s tilt.

Accompanying the Tatlin replica is a side exhibition, “Revolutionary Film Posters: Aesthetic Experiments of Russian Constructivism, 1920-1933,” consisting of two rooms of terrific vintage Soviet film posters shown to a blaring soundtrack of music from Sergei Eisenstein’s films. It is entertaining, but ultimately slight.

Tatlin’s notion of truth to materials—his belief that wood, metal and glass impose different necessary conditions on the art object—and his interest in the fusion of art and technology are one of the precursors of Donald Judd’s Minimalism, currently on view at David Zwirner.

Zwirner’s gallery, which recently began representing the Donald Judd foundation, reunites 12 works that figured in a 1989 Judd exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden. For obsessive enthusiasts of Judd’s work—and there are many—this chance to observe the first time Judd used colored anodized aluminum in such a large, floor-mounted format, as the gallery’s literature puts it, is cause for excitement.

For those not enticed by this formal description, however, there is the overall appearance of the exhibition. Light falls from the Zwirner skylights, catching each of the regal open aluminum boxes, hitting the orange and turquoise plexi interior panels and radiating onto the walls of the gray aluminum cubes. A subtle effect is produced that is both atmospheric and antiseptic.

From drawings on display we glean the logic of the show: large, open aluminum boxes with black, blue or orange inserts configured systematically; the dozen boxes together create a set of repeated forms.

Judd famously defined his works as “specific objects”—neither painting nor sculpture. He jettisoned most of the qualities that people associate with art (representation, flatness, composition) while retaining others (rectangularity, space, form and color). Judd’s objects are simple forms that employ new industrial materials like formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglass and brass.

As usual, Judd’s claim to the pure logic and compositional order seems suspect, and what you experience here is the beauty of the color and texture of these supposedly banal materials, and the eccentricities of what he proposed were systematic compositions.

As New York’s museums battle for visitors and put on exhibitions that sometimes seem safe or uninspired, commercial galleries are increasingly filling in the gaps. Dealers hire guards, pay commercial rents and manage block-long lines. Sure, these shows may be ways for galleries to advertise their clout to prospective clients, but they display remarkable artwork at no charge to the viewer, so, in the end, we all profit.

editorial@observer.com

Thirty-two years old in October 1912, Pablo Picasso had one major painting under his belt (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907). He had found a smart gallerist in Daniel Kahnweiler. He had just left Montmartre for Montparnasse (neighborhoods as far away from each other as you can get in Paris, like leaving Harlem for Red Hook). He was newly in love; in moving he had quit an eight-year relationship for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called "Ma Jolie." Something is happening when you dump your old girlfriend, move your studio to the other end of town, leave behind the weight of an old project and launch into something completely new.

In a photograph, we see Picasso's new studio at 242 Boulevard Raspail. Drawings and a paperboard sculpture of a guitar hang above a bed covered with cut newspaper scraps. A turned-over African mask in one corner is an artifact from his recent fascination with primitive art. If it took 16 sketchbooks to plan the Demoiselles, and if that large painting was still sitting in this studio unsold, here Picasso is working more quickly and with more transitory materials: cardboard, newspaper, scissors, charcoal. It must have felt liberating. It is exhilarating to see.

The drawings pull you into their logic. At the exhibition, I saw a man and his daughter playing a game of trying to decipher which parts of the guitar were represented by which line, strip of newsprint or collaged wallpaper square. Picasso has his fantastical moments, too. Some lines and shapes are never going to match up with anything but the gleeful desire to make a mark. Watch for the flipping of the newspaper sheet in Violin (Dec. 3, 1912, or later), where a cut newspaper square cartwheels in space simply to rhyme itself. These are giddy visual puns, three-dimensional games--in Violin (1912), a sketched button, shaded as if it were casting a shadow, tacks a taut drawn violin string up to a bare paper wall. By the time I got to Musical Score and Guitar (1912), I laughed out loud at the real straight pin holding a scrap of paper to the picture.

As is often the case upon first learning a language, the vocabulary is deliberately restricted and what is really under investigation is syntax. His building blocks are fake wood, fake marble, newspaper, wallpaper, paperboard, cardboard, charcoal, ink and sheet metal, things that are either utterly evident or exist to trouble the line between real and illusion. In the drawings, Picasso's charcoal lines are breathing, syncopated, not executed mechanically in a single stroke but segmented and rhythmic. The support is often raw canvas or paper.

There is something to seeing these yellowed, nearly hundred-year-old newspaper cutouts. A newspaper is an inherently unstable, fast-aging medium. The idea that a newspaper sheet like this page could be not tomorrow's trash, but art--that was new. Suddenly the world was not just art's subject, but also its stuff. Incorporating grit, newspaper and show tunes on a flat surface--this went beyond painting modern life. (If newspapers die, we may have a different relationship to these Picassos. Maybe it's worth seeing them while we still remember what they feel like and how they work.)

The paintings aren't the Cubist oils he had begun making with Georges Braque, those slightly scaly, coppery, silvery monochromes with the gridded and tilted planes. Here, paintings are colorful pink and green, just as the paper collages are patterned with decorative wallpaper, and the drawings sparse but sly. This is synthetic (rather than analytic) Cubism, but most of all it is fun, the way language can be fun if you take apart words or sentences and put them back together.

By late 1913, the works aren't as exhilaratingly inventive, but they are more beautiful, calm. Bar Table with Guitar (1913) is held together with many pins, drawing as dressmaking. Picasso brings in new kinds of surfaces, like glitter. If the start of the show is the paperboard-and-string Still Life with Guitar, provisional, awkward (and newly reassembled with a recently identified missing piece), the end is the 1914 sheet metal sculpture Guitar, materially more confident but a less exuberant copy of the first. The books will tell you: This was the invention of collage. The guitars have transformed representational painting. The best ones are still in the present tense, however--that's the magic. A sequence of works like this shows that if there is an origin to any universe, it's in the most ordinary stuff: in newspapers and music-hall tunes, in wine, in wallpaper and in a couple years of confident, focused work.

editorial@observer.com

"To change the topic, any thoughts on Picasso's Blue Period?"

--writer for Paris Review, during Michael Bloomberg's March 2 press conference at the Armory Art Show.

1. Brits Fight for Arts Funding
British art-world heavyweights have begun a letter-writing campaign to the government protesting proposed budget cuts for arts funding. Famous patrons like Lord Stevenson argue that philanthropic gifts cannot replace government funds; gallery directors plead for a 10 percent, rather than 25 percent, cut.

Our take: Cutting funding for an industry that yields at least 2 euro for every 1 euro invested isn't just desperate-it's bad business.  
[The Guardian]

2. Medici Cold Case: Solved!
Scientists concluded that Francesco de Medici and his wife Bianca were not poisoned to death, as drama-loving art historians previously believed. After exhuming the bodies of the nearly 400-year-old art patrons in Florence, researchers confirmed the two died of malaria.

Our take: All this anthropological art news is fascinating, but it makes us wonder what Italian scientists could innovate if they weren't picking at the bones of dead Renaissance figures all day.
[Discovery News]

3. Rem Koolhaas to Receive Golden Lion
The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas-famous for creating buildings that evoke the sentiment, "The future is now"-will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice.

Our take: The man has been one of Time's 100 Most Influential People and he was knighted into an order established by Napoleon Bonaparte. A Golden Lion just seems logical.

4. Picasso and Chagall Forgery Ring Busted in France
Twelve men involved in a French forgery ring were imprisoned and fined up to $1.2 million for trafficking over 100 fake versions Picasso and Chagall paintings between 1997 and 2005. They approached buyers as down-on-their-luck heirs in need of fast cash.

Our take: Attention, Russia: This is what an art crime looks like! (Clarification: It's not curating a show that includes Jesus with a Mickey Mouse head.)
[AFP]

5. Art World on the Move
More than six galleries will move to new, expanded locations this fall, including two of Chelsea's most prominent galleries, Lombard-Fried and Zach Feuer. Gallerists cite a number of reasons for the geographical shuffle, like low commercial real estate prices, marketing, and increased appeal to artists.
 
Our take: Some say mid-priced galleries are still struggling and paying for their expansions out of savings. It's unclear whether those investments will actually pay off.
[NYO]
 
6. Egon Schiele Restitution Dispute Resolved
After more than a decade of complicated legal action, the Leopold Museum in Vienna agreed to pay $19 million to buy an Egon Schiele painting from the heirs of a Jewish gallery owner from whom the Nazis stole the work in 1938. The painting was seized by the US government while on loan to MoMA in 1997 and held for the duration of the dispute.

Our take: The fact that the dispute took ten years to work out means the only ones really winning here are the organizations' lawyers.
[NYT]

7. Christie's Founds New Art Fair
Christie's will sponsor a fair devoted to contemporary prints, editions, and photographs during the week of London's Frieze Fair in October.  The fair will model itself after the annual Editions/Artists' Book Fair in New York.

Our take: Although the idea of yet another art fair is daunting, Chistie's smartly identified a gap in Frieze's programming and a good opportunity. 
[Bloomberg]

8. Rodarte Collaborates with Catherine Opie on Art Book
The sisters behind the fashion label Rodarte have invited artists such as Catherine Opie and Gregory Krum to interpret their designs through photography for the book "Rodarte: Mondo Rodarte," due out in November.

Our take: The "art-as-side-project" trend hits a new high. (Celebrity fashion lines: out. Fashion fine art projects: in.)
[Artinfo]

9. Aspen Gallerists Accused of Unethical Practices
Several Aspen art galleries were accused of unethical business practices, such as selling slightly altered imitations of work by established local artists signed with fake names and manipulating the market by selling works at a 70 percent discount. So far, the gallerists have been cleared of any wrongdoing; federal prosecutors declined to pursue the case, citing a lack of evidence.

Our take: The story is a case study of the effects of pricing on the art market as a whole. What the gallerists are doing may not be illegal, but it's definitely cheating.
[Aspen Daily News]

10. Art Market on the Rise
According to a survey released by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, art prices are rising in all sectors of the market except ceramics. Price increases in the $75,000-plus bracket doubled in the second quarter of 2010, compared with the first three months of the year.

Our take: Any market recovery is a good thing, but lower to mid-price segments of the market may still be looking at a rough road ahead.
[BBC]

The auctioneer was Tobias Meyer, who had an unhurried approach. He’d freeze into a tableau vivant with each new bid. As for getting buyers to spend more money, his method was classic guilt trip. He pushed his eyebrows up, stared bidders in the face and asked, “Are we all done?”  Matisse’s Bouquet de Fleurs pour le Quatorze Juillet was the most expensive item of the night, selling for $28,642,500, $3 million over the estimate.

Many of the pieces sold for within estimate, and in the aftershock of Christie’s record-breaking $106 million Picasso sale the night before, it was noticeable that a handful of lesser works by the Spanish painter didn’t sell here.

“I think you’re undoubtedly looking to make comparisons between apples and oranges,” Bill Ruprecht, Sotheby’s president, said. As for that Picasso at the rival house, “Things that should have happened probably did.” Okay!

The company reported its quarterly earnings this morning, and it looks like the art market’s picking up: First quarter revenues were $102 million, up 87 percent from last year.

PREVIOUSLY: Alexandra Peers' Q&A with Tobias Meyer.

I wasn’t surprised. I had taken the row of black Mercedes limos in front of 20 Rockefeller Plaza as a good omen.

“Lot 6,” auctioneer Christopher Burge said in a plumy, aristocratic voice. The room let out a murmur. Mr. Burge stretched his arms slowly over his podium, gave a satisfied sigh, and smiled. “The bidding starts at $58 million.” A collective grin.

The scene was silent and tense. No one coughed or breathed. Someone dropped an iPhone and my heart jumped out of my mouth. As the cost approached $80 million, eight bidders from around the world were still haggling with Mr. Burge. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought of my student loans and shuddered visibly.

The auctioneer spoke clear and fast. “$89 million,” Mr. Burge said. A long pause. He leaned his entire body over the podium. The room let out a low, disappointed “aww…” and I said “shucks” under my breath. No record broken. Then! From the telephone: “Just a second.”

“Just a second? Sure!” Mr. Burge said.

I buried my face in the catalog, too stressed out to watch Mr. Burge’s frenetic movements. It was my first art auction. I had picked a good one.

The price was finally settled at $95 million to Nicholas Hall, a Christie’s expert who took the anonymous winning bid by telephone. Buyer’s premium took the price Christie’s reported up to the record breaking $106.5 million.

The audience let out a huge communal breath and began to shuffle around. Reporters were crammed together behind a giant pole. Half of them rushed out for cigarettes, or quotes. I raced around the auction room for a better view.

A total of $335,548,000 was spent last night. It was the third biggest sale in the auction house’s history and four out of five artworks offered sold. Ms. Brody’s collection alone fetched just over $224 million. She began collecting decades ago with a single sculpture, given to her by her husband as a Christmas present.

“We’re part of a process in which collections are being made,” Christie’s expert Matthew Stephenson said to me after the sale. He’d spent the night on the phone, calling in bids. “For five or six weeks we spend time with these objects, building up towards the sale. It all comes out to an hour on the auction block. That’s the exciting part. You see a collection through.”

As for the Brodys, whose collection just became the biggest single owner sale in the history of New York? “They went on a very exciting journey,” Mr. Stephenson said. “People can still do that.” Perhaps, after repaying those student loans.

Some people are unimpressed.

"Despite the high figure, the event feels a bit ho-hum," writes Holland Cotter in The Times. "The sales price is, relatively speaking, just a notch up from the $104.5 million that Sotheby’s got for a Giacometti sculpture in London in February."