Helly Nahmad poses in front of a Picasso. (Photo by Arnaldo Magnani/Getty Images)

As The Observer—and every other news outlet—has been scrambling to report in detail, the city is abuzz over the high-profile indictment and arrests of figures in an art-world money laundering scheme involving seven-figure card games, international sports betting rings and mixed martial arts fighters who played the Rocky Balboa role of debt collector. Now, The Observer has exclusive information on the high-stakes poker games at the heart of the ongoing investigation.

To recap, here's what we know so far.

Art dealer and collector Hillel (“Helly”) Nahmad, who runs the Helly Nahmad Gallery inside the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue, was named in a sweeping federal criminal indictment in which it is alleged that the 34-year-old Mr. Nahmad joined with Russians named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov and Vadim Trincher to launder millions of dollars.

According to the indictment:

The Nahmad-Trincher Organization used online gambling websites, operating illegally in the United States, to operate an illegal gambling business that generated tens of millions of dollars in bets each year.

The Nahmad-Trincher Organization laundered the proceeds of the gambling operation through a host of American bank accounts and Titan P & H LLC (“Titan”), a plumbing company in the Bronx that the Nahmad-Trincher Organization acquired a fifty percent interest in as repayment of a gambling debt.

The Nahmad family, descended from a banking dynasty in Aleppo, Syria, is "one of the richest and most powerful art-dealing dynasties in the world" according to Forbes, which estimates the family fortune at more than $3 billion, citing, in addition to the New York gallery and another in London that is run by a cousin (also named Helly Nahmad), a warehouse near Geneva International Airport said to hold up to 5,000 works of art, including 300 Picassos.

According to Forbes, the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Squad uncovered "high-stakes poker and sports-betting dens that were frequented by prominent New Yorkers in the financial, sports and entertainment fields."

The Observer can share for the first time details of the high-stakes card games mentioned in the indictment as "COUNT TWENTY (Illegal Poker Business)." At least five sources have come forward to discuss with The Observer the inner workings of these high-stakes card games. All agreed to speak on the condition that they would not be identified. They include two people who personally attended the games in question, one who helped run the games for many months, and a fourth who is intimately involved in business transactions with many of those named in the indictment.

Several sources with firsthand knowledge of the games named some of the players, including household names in the world of finance such as Daniel Andrew "Andy" Beal, chairman of Beal Bank, who makes no secret of his enjoyment of and expertise in poker, along with others who are less eager to publicize their affinity for Texas hold ’em. According to two sources, one well-known financier "is there every week."

Also spotted at some of the city's high-stakes games have been boldfaced Hollywood names like Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nick Cassavetes, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

It's unknown how these allegations will impact those who are not named in the indictment but are alleged to have played in the games. According to no fewer than five sources, one regular player from the finance world who is active in high-level political fund-raising "is very nervous" about the indictment and arrests.

Both Helly Nahmad and "The Russians" (Messrs. Tokhtakhounov and  Trincher) have apartments in Trump Tower. One resident of Trump Tower told The Observer, "I'd see these guys for three to four years coming into Trump Tower, and they didn't live there. They would go not to Helly's but to the Russians' apartment. Other times they'd go to The Plaza. One thing I'll say about Helly, I have never seen a human being who has more good-looking girls."

One gentleman The Observer spoke to worked at the card games. He quit a few months ago when various poker players started getting calls from the feds. "They started contacting professional players and anyone potentially involved for information and confirmation months ago, and have been trying to bust the case for a while," he said.

A source close to Eugene and Ilya Trincher—the sons of Vadim Trincher, who is named in the indictment, as is Eugene—claims that the elder Mr. Trincher is a mystery, even to the sons' closest friends. "Nobody knows what Vadim’s business actually is, because Vadim doesn’t talk to anybody.”

The former employee claims that Eugene and Ilya Trincher were partners in heading the sports-betting operations, and that the younger Trinchers were the go-to sports betting option for many Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. Apparently they weren't bookmakers in the traditional sense, in which the goal is simply to line up even amounts of capital on both sides of a bet and live off the 10 percent vigorish collected from losing bettors. Instead, they had created an "algorithm" that predicted which teams would win. Ilya Trincher was rumored to be living in one of the priciest houses in L.A., with rent anywhere between $40,000 and $50,000, alleged to be funded by sports gambling money, including bets of up to $1 million per game.

One source said that Edwin Ting (known as Eddie, also indicted) "ran the highest-stakes poker games in New York, probably made more money than anyone else ever did playing poker in New York." The source continued, “He’s just a Chinese guy from Queens, graduated from Baruch College. His wife was a poker dealer, now he’s a millionaire (and a real scumbag, by the way)."

According to a source with knowledge of Russian organized crime, the first person listed in the indictment, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, known as Taiwanchik, is from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and "has the highest ranking you can have in the Russian prison system. He’s part of the prison brotherhood. They sit in jail with newspapers, caviar and laptops."

Another part of the sports betting picture is Noah Siegel, known as "The Oracle," who was also indicted. According to the former employee, The Oracle wasn't involved in business decisions; instead, "he was the smart kid with glasses who knows every player on every team and would pick the winning teams" with the goal of bankrupting traditional bookmakers.

The employee The Observer spoke to and all others working the games were asked to sign disclosures stating that they “never met” certain celebrities, and they were not allowed to use phones during special bookings, which included "a lot of lawyers, a lot of finance guys, a lot of hedge funders."

Another name that came up during The Observer's investigation was the R&B record producer Irv Gotti a.k.a. Irving Lorenzo, who is known to run games. One source was shocked that Mr. Gotti was not snared in this dragnet. He said Mr. Gotti "surprisingly was not raided during this whole thing, which is extremely strange. The feds have walked into his [poker game] in the past and have never shut him down."

One source painted a picture of how the whole thing works.

"First of all, you have an apartment that’s rented under somebody else’s name. You buy a poker table, some chips and chairs, and a casino shuffler on the black market, because they’re illegal to buy. The shuffler is to make the players feel comfortable that there’s no cheating going on. There are two dealers and two to 10 players per game. There are two to three waitresses and also 'massage girls.' The games go anywhere from six to 48 hours. Generally, the games start in the evening and finish in the morning, because most people need to go work, see their families and whatnot."

Another gambler who frequented the game spoke of the card shuffler but put a different spin on it. "It wasn't so much to prevent cheating. It was there to ensure there was always a freshly shuffled deck." This gambler recalled attending games hosted by Mike Sokoloff, a New York society fixture who dated Charlotte Ronson, that were frequented by David Lee (then a New York Knick, now a Golden State Warrior), as well as "a lot of other Knicks." This gambler said he "saw David Lee at the Molly Bloom games as well," referring to the 34-year-old socialite who is referred to as “Poker Princess” in the indictment and is the sister of Olympic skier Jerry Bloom.

A different source also referred to the Poker Princess: "Molly Bloom just ran games, flew private jets back and forth to run games for the wealthy."

According to someone with inside knowledge of the games, “There are no nobodies in this indictment, literally. These people are simple businessmen—not mob, not anything relating to it. They are maybe doing some organized crime, but they’re not the mob."

Simple businessmen they may be. But there's a good chance that not-so-simple trouble awaits. One source with extensive knowledge of the casino industry told The Observer that U.S. tax law requires all winnings to be reported as income. And as a check on the dishonesty of individual gamblers, a casino is required to report any payout in excess of $10,000.

Like a guy catching a straight flush on the river—it's a solid bet that this 84-page indictment naming 33 individuals is only the tip of the iceberg.

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

'Jeune Fille Endormie' (1935) by Picasso.

Simon Shaw is droll in the way you might expect a Sotheby’s department head to be, but there was only a shadow of irony in his voice when The Observer brought up Femmes lisant (deux personnages), a 1934 Picasso painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter that Sotheby’s sold in May for $21.3 million.

“It’s the summer of Marie-Thérèse!” Mr. Shaw exclaimed, mostly not kidding.

“Well,” said the London gallerist Richard Nagy, who seemed amused when told of his colleague’s branding. “That just depends on what Sotheby’s has to sell, doesn’t it?”

This month it is, in fact, a rival of Sotheby’s that has something to sell. On June 21, the London branch of Christie’s will put on the block Jeune Fille Endormie (1935), another Picasso painting of Marie-Thérèse; it’s estimated to fetch between $14 million and $19 million and is just the latest in a series of offerings that prompted Art Market Monitor to ask, “Is This a Marie-Thérèse Bubble?” Demand for Picasso’s diverse oeuvre has been widening in recent years to include pictures created later in his career. Around 2009, a period of declining value in the art market at large, the previously overlooked late-period Picassos of the 1960’s and 1970’s saw a spike in demand and a doubling in value.

In the spring of 2009, Gagosian Gallery’s 21st Street branch had lines down the block for a show of the artist’s very last canvases. Now, an exhibit of some 80 Marie-Thérèse works in that very same space—many of them from the artist’s family—are generating similar crowds. It may seem obvious to say that works depicting this particular mistress of Picasso are popular with collectors. A Marie-Thérèse painting (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, 1932) from the estate of collector Frances Brody garnered the highest-ever price for a painting at auction last year when it went for $106 million, and it wasn’t an anomaly—with money flowing into the art market, collectors seem almost as eager to buy works from the period as sellers are to obtain them.

Marie-Thérèse’s popularity isn’t new—a broad description of the Picassos associated with her checks off many of the qualities collectors value in any painting, including a colorful palette and a curvy, sexualized female figure. They are instantly recognizable as Picassos and even come with a torrid love story. When Picasso met his muse outside the Galleries Lafayette in 1927, she was 17 to his 45; they had a child, and remained lovers until the late 1930’s.

Some believe the market craze for Marie-Thérèse dates to the high-profile Victor and Sally Ganz sale at Christie’s in 1997, when Le Rêve (1932) sold for a whopping $48.4 million, but she also had her moments in the 1980’s. Le Miroir (1932) sold at Sotheby’s in 1989 at the height of the market boom to a Japanese client for $26.4 million. (In 1995, it reappeared, fetching $20 million at Christie’s despite the art market’s being in its mid-90’s slump.)

“Those are iconic Picassos for the people who have been buying Picasso since the 80’s,” said Pace Gallery president Marc Glimcher, of the works from the Marie-Thérèse period. “Prior to that they were anything but iconic. They were decorative Picassos that nobody took that seriously. That’s why there were so many of them still hanging around” on the market in the 80’s, he said. “But this is how the world changes.”

If the interest in Marie-Thérèse isn’t new, there certainly seems to be more of it, judging by the impressive—if sometimes hypothetical—returns some have seen on their investments. La Lecture (1932), a painting that went for $40 million at Sotheby’s in London in February, sold for just $5.7 million in 1989, according to ArtNet. Les Amants (1932) went for $6.3 million in 2000, and jumped to $14.6 million in 2007. And the present owner of Le Rêve, hotelier Steve Wynn, was negotiating to sell his picture to Steve Cohen for $139 million in 2006 before Mr. Wynn accidentally put his elbow through it. After repairs, Mr. Wynn decided not to sell the painting, but tantalizingly exhibited it in a Marie-Thérèse show at New York’s Acquavella Galleries in 2008.

“If Le Rêve and all the other [Ganz Picasso] pictures were on the market now they would probably double or triple those results,” said Giovanna Bertazzoni, head of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s London.

Mr. Glimcher, as it happens, is bringing a Picasso that, as he put it, “can be called a Marie-Thérèse” to Art Basel, the world’s most prestigious fair for modern and contemporary art, which opens this week. But he laughed off the notion that he was following a trend.

“If it looks like it’s a crass marketing ploy, it isn’t” he said. “It’s not like you can go to the Picasso store and go find a nice color for Marie-Thérèse.”

Not exactly. But it is a seller’s market, and critic John Berger estimated in his book The Success and Failure of Picasso that the artist painted and drew no other woman “half as many times” as he did Marie-Thérèse (he also said, in 1965, that Picasso owned some 50 Marie-Thérèse paintings himself). After the sale of La Lecture, in London in February, Mr. Shaw reached out to collectors for a Marie-Thérèse for the May sale in New York to fill the “evident demand in the marketplace” and was able to get Femmes lisant rather quickly, putting it on the cover of the catalogue for the May auction. He said the timing with Gagosian’s show was serendipitous.

“We had secured that work for sale, then suddenly Gagosian announced that there was this fabulous show that was going to happen on Marie-Thérèse,” Mr. Shaw said. “We were delighted because it set the whole thing in context.”

The context is valuable, said Valentina Castellani, the Gagosian director who organized the exhibit with Picasso biographer John Richardson and Marie-Thérèse’s granddaughter Diana Widmaier Picasso, who approached the gallery about the exhibit around the time of the Brody sale. While the Picasso family was instrumental in securing many of the works on display, there are also a number of not-for-sale loans from private collections, which means that there’s a P.R. element.

“The message that we send out to collectors is Gagosian is the place where, if you have a beautiful Picasso, you can probably sell it,” Ms. Castellani said. “Or if you want to buy a beautiful Picasso, you can contact us. I think it gives an unmatchable position in the Picasso world.”

The subtext here may well be: bring your Picasso to one of Gagosian’s 11 galleries worldwide rather than to an auction house. In 2008, a senior Gagosian director told journalist Sarah Thornton, “The Gagosian empire competes more with the auction houses than with the galleries.”

After Femmes lisant, which was estimated to sell for as much as $35 million, sold to its one bidder at the low end of its presale estimate, Larry Gagosian told reporter Judd Tully, “[Sotheby’s] got lucky, I think, and I’m glad they sold it.” Having a picture publicly fail to sell because its estimate was too high would have arguably hurt a market Mr. Gagosian has done much to develop recently.

The Gagosian show is fiendishly biographical, hitting visitors with pressure-building photographs and sketches that hint at Marie-Thérèse’s early influence, leading them to a giant room meant to evoke the explosive urges that fueled the relationship, and clustering them at the exit with a love letter. And why not play up the love story? It’s hot stuff. Noted Picasso biographer Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington wrote in 1988 that Marie-Thérèse was an “endlessly submissive and willing sexual pupil who readily accepted all experimentation, including sadism, with absolute obedience to Picasso’s will.”

“Clearly we are using it for the market purposes because it’s a good story, because it’s saucy, because it’s sexy,” said Ms. Bertazzoni, the Christie’s specialist. “All these stories add fascination to the fetish and it’s very easy to tell the stories, and create a myth around the painting that one is about to buy.”

It’s a sales pitch Picasso might well have approved, given the highly biographical elements of the works themselves, but it’s also somewhat necessary, as the Marie-Thérèse pictures have not been widely considered to possess quite the historical heft of other Picassos. (The previous record for world’s most expensive painting at auction was held by a Rose-Period Picasso, Boy With a Pipe [1904-06], which sold for $104 million in 2004.)

“[The Marie-Thérèse period] doesn’t have nearly the historical significance that cubism, for example, or Picasso’s so-called surrealist work does,” said Jeffery Weiss, who has curated a show on the artist at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. “But it’s always occupied a pretty solid level of interest on the part of most historians of Picasso’s work—outside of the field of Picasso studies, it’s true it hasn’t been given a lot of attention.”

For this reason, Mr. Richardson’s involvement has probably never been more valuable to Gagosian, even if he didn’t star in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece, as Ms. Widmaier Picasso did. A vital, engaging scholar and a source of instant credibility, Mr. Richardson, 87, officially joined the gallery as an adviser in 2008. But most of his later years have been spent writing his Life of Picasso, the first volume of which emerged in 1991. That covered the artist’s life only through 1906, and Mr. Richardson survived partially on donations to the John Richardson Fund for Picasso Research, established by his friend Sid Bass, while he wrote two more volumes. On the occasion of the Gagosian exhibition, Vanity Fair excerpted part of Mr. Richardson’s forthcoming fourth and final volume under the heading “Picasso’s Erotic Code.” You can even watch videos of Mr. Richardson discussing the exhibit on the newly released Gagosian iPad app.

“Just because of the book and because of the biography itself, he’s responsible for positioning Marie-Thérèse material close to the center of a certain kind of interest,” said Dr. Weiss. “And that includes the market.”

So if the historical significance and market appeal diverge slightly, the story becomes crucial to legitimizing something people already want to like. Mr. Gagosian and the auctions aren’t selling anything people don’t want already, and it’s quite possible that if a trove of weightier Picassos came onto this flush market, they’d sell for just as much money, though such a matchup is unlikely.

“People often say, ‘Why isn’t Rembrandt the most expensive artist?’” Mr. Glimcher said. “Because there are no Rembrandts left in the marketplace. They’re all in museums.”

He added that if there’s been a price grab for Marie-Thérèse Picassos, it’s because the ones that have hit the market have been particularly good. It is hard not to admire what’s on display at the Gagosian show. When The Observer visited it last month, visitors seemed to have a visceral reactions to the works, gasping at their sexual frankness and cooing over Marie-Thérèse’s beauty.

Wandering in that giant second room, The Observer spotted the fashion designer Valentino Garavani, whose pondering of the works was more reserved, a gloved finger to his lips. He wore a beige suit and pink sunglasses. A longtime art collector, Valentino once bought Picassos from the artist’s tailor. Scooting in among his entourage, The Observer inquired: Was he a fan of the Marie-Thérèse period?

“Yeah,” Valentino replied, standing before a pair of entwined figures. “They’re the best ones, for me.”

dduray@observer.com

"He was such a prolific artist" that he's always in the auctions, noted David Norman, co-chairman of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern art department, which holds its $200 million evening sale on Tuesday, May 3. (Christie's auction is the following day.)

But nothing happens by accident at these carefully orchestrated events. In February, Christie's got $7.8 million for a 1901 Picasso, painted at a time when the artist was 19 and a new immigrant to Paris; this time around there are two from that year for sale. Similarly, "we had a great result--$40.7 million in February" for a 1932 Picasso, said Mr. Norman, and now the house is offering a stylistically similar 1934 portrait, though such works are not generally easy to find. "Great results get the attention of collectors who have similar paintings," Mr. Norman noted.

They'd be loath to admit it, but the auction houses are also aping über-dealer Larry Gagosian, who opened "Picasso and Marie-Therese: L'amour four" last week, an 80-work blockbuster show featuring images, in many mediums, of Picasso's longtime secret between-the-wars mistress, Marie-Therese. Suffice it to say that virtually any collector who wants a Picasso, and can afford one, is coming to New York City in May.

Also on the auction block are a Picasso sheet metal sculpture and a salute to Delacroix at Christie's, and a provincial family portrait at Sotheby's. There are Surrealist Picassos, Classical-era Picassos, heroic Picassos. There's an artwork for every taste, if not for every budget, as most unique works are in the six to eight figures.

So here's the real reason for the Picasso perfect storm: The art market seems robust, and the country seems recovered, but nobody's taking any chances. An unusual Picasso is, ultimately, less of a bottom-line risk than a great work by another artist. This year, in a still-iffy economy, the blue-chip Spanish master rules.

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

Moreover, the Met pulled in people with shows that, for want of a tonier phrase, were from the basement.  Director Tom Campbell said that three of the four exhibitions which were among the most viewed in the fiscal year were assembled from the Met's existing holdings (in other words, not pricey imported loan shows). The trend "is especially heartening," said Mr. Campbell, in a statement. (No word on whether the traffic will help solve some of the museum's fiscal problems in recent years.)   But the total "sends a signal about the enduring importance of culture and cultural institutions to the public, especially during this period of recession," the director added.

The attendance breakdown, year-to-date, is Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with 380,574 visitors (it's open until August 15); Vermeer's Masterpiece The Milkmaid, with 329,446 visitors, and American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity (also open to August 15) with 175,033 visitors. Although it's never crystal-clear how such counts are put together - don't lots of people head for the mummies, the Monets, and the gift shop? - the Starn Brothers' current show on the roof was also a big draw, the Met reported.

The U.S. still has a ways to go in the museum Olympics, however. When it comes to worldwide rankings, exhibitions in Paris and Tokyo were the most packed in 2009, according to The Art Newspaper's stats for the calendar year.