Pablo Picasso did not paint only chefs d'oeuvre. This mandoline on a table painted in 1922 is rather a boring picture (81.6 x 100.1 cm.) that will bring me to sleep rather than to ecstasy. It was in the property of the late Evelyn Annenberg Hall - a long-time Trustee of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC)- and a famous art collector herself.
She had a weakness for the handsome Pablo of whom she acquired her first picture in 1940, an acquisition qualified of remarkable for the epoch. Mrs. Annenberg Hall passed away in 2005 at age 93 in her home in Manhattan, NYC. With her second husband, William Jaffe, a corporate lawyer, she assembled an outstanding private art collection that included European paintings, sculpture and antique furniture, Chinese porcelain, pre-Colombian artifacts and Renaissance drawings.
This Picasso's picture which was estimated by the autioneer between $3,500,000 - $4,500,000 barely reached 3,1 million includind buyer's premium. The present still-life was painted during the winter of 1922 in the apartment on the fashionable rue La Boétie that Picasso shared with his wife, Olga Khokhlova, and their infant son, Paulo. Like the guitar, the mandolin is a recurrent motif throughout Picasso's work of the 1910s and 1920s. It appears in one of his most important cubist portraits, Fanny Tellier, a painting that some asserted would change the course of cubism.
Well this picture is not going to change the course of my life and has certainly not changed the course of the auction at which it was sold in November 2008.
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