The Business of the Art – Creativity and Innovation Inspiration

Last year (2023) a conversation about creativity and innovation around art started about a great artist. 

The Picasso Celebration 1973-2023’: 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso.  This celebration triggered the desire to bring the amazing art of Picasso over to the United States to stimulate interaction with businesses and education and encourage creativity.

Pablo Picasso from Malaga (10/25/1881 – 04/08/1973), as loved in Spain as in France, and internationally.

Pablo Picasso was a multiple creator, he equally dominated the classical painting of his early years, as well as engraving, lithographic printing and other pictorial techniques. He painted from ceramics to an allegorical mural to peace, such as his ‘Guernica’. And he was not alien to sculptural creation. His work is that of a complete creator. His inspiration always found him working on a new work. He placed the cubist avant-garde ahead of his contemporary fellow artists. He was a tireless worker. He played all the styles and had time to dance, go to the bullfights and surround himself in very Spanish parties with his best friends. He was also a skillful negotiator of his art.  

His life, through his artistic legacy, will be remembered in this year 2023, the 50th anniversary of his death in Mougins, France on April 8, 1973. A landmark year, as two other great artists also left us: the Catalan cellist Pau Casals and the Chilean poet, Nobel Prize winner, Pablo Neruda.  

Picasso is considered, by critics specialized in plastic arts, as the most important of the 20th century.

In order for his work to be remembered, recognized again or discovered by the youngest of this 21st century, the governments of Spain and France, organized ‘The Picasso Celebration 1973-2023’. Its programming covered fifty activities, including 42 exhibitions, two Congresses and a series of educational events. 

The events included, 16 in Spain, 12 in France, 7 in the US, 2 in Germany, 2 in Switzerland, 1 in the Principality of Monaco, 1 in Romania and 1 in Belgium.  

One of the congresses took place at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in the fall, followed by an important international symposium held in Paris, from December 6 to 8, 2023, at the UNESCO headquarters.

The Madrid congress opened the reflection from the context of the first avantgarde Picasso, while the one in Paris served as a meeting point for all the venues and agents involved in the Celebration (museum institutions, research centers and researchers) around the theme. ‘Picasso in the 21st century’: historiographical and cultural issues, opening up to the participation of art historians, renowned exhibition curators in the Picasso field, artists, writers and collectors.  

Parallel to the aforementioned exhibitions and congresses, there was an extensive educational program to disseminate the work and life of Pablo Picasso. In this stage, which took place throughout 2023, the administrations of Malaga, A Coruña, Madrid and Barcelona collaborate, the Spanish cities linked especially to the artistic development of the painter. 

The enormous economic power of the Picasso family continues to grow 

This is of course in because of the Millionaire Art of Pablo Picasso. 

After 140 years of his birth, his work continues to collect astronomical sums The enormous economic power of the Picasso family continues to grow 

His works continue to be for sale all over the world, from the big auction houses, to Amazon, eBay, Artmajeur, and many other sites.

In the city of gambling, Las Vegas, Sotheby’s installed its salon, where it raised over $108 million dollars, (October 23, 2021). Awarding 11 works by Pablo Picasso, one of them the portrait of his muse and lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. 

When Pablo Picasso died in 1973, who had been a careful gauge of his work with an eye toward its future sale, he left an unsigned detail: his will. His immense artistic heritage was divided among several of his descendants. 

Thus, his granddaughter, Marina Picasso, daughter of Paulo Picasso, eldest son of the artist from Malaga with his first wife, the Russian dancer, Olga Jojlova. His granddaughter inherited 10,000 of her works from her grandfather, some of which decorate her private house in Geneva. She gives an idea of Picasso’s prolific output.

She and her son, Florian, Picasso’s great-grandson, manage the flow of Picasso’s works, taking care of the prices according to the scarcity of his works in the market for private collectors and public museums, thus maintaining the balance of prices between the precarious supply and abundant demand. The new way to sell works: NFT Now, they are venturing into the universe of digital sales. The NFT (Non-Fungible-Token) market, also known as ‘cryptographic assets’, means entering a new emerging market to place Picasso’s extensive work still kept in family deposits. NFTs are digitized original works. They are presented as a combination of different audiovisual media, including music by Florian Picasso, who is a prominent DJ. These new artistic pieces are treated using encryption (blockchain), the same used for cryptocurrencies. Picasso’s work has taken on a new dimension in this new digital art market. 

In this new way of offering art (NFT), those who purchase a digitized work by Picasso will receive a certificate that they are buying a unique work or one of which there are very few copies. It approximates the way of having an original in the conventional art market. 

In the new NFT trade, buyers are not simply acquiring certification of owning a rare or unique work, similar to acquiring an original in the conventional art market. 

Specialists assure that this new market will be set up in millions of dollars, similar to the classic way of acquiring artistic works by Picasso. 

Marina Picasso and her son Florián thus mark a turning point by placing this Picasso offer in the world of digital sales, without losing the original value of their works. That first test is based on a ceramic, created in 1958. Closely linked to her life and family, according to Marina. From this work, they have created 1,010 tokens made up of five series of 200 pieces. The sale has been made through their own platform, created by them, ManAndTheBeat.com, which also names this collection. The remaining ten pieces are offered through the digital auction house, Nifty Gateway. 

The 20 most expensive works in the world 

Among that two dozen of the most expensive works today are two by Pablo Picasso. 

Picasso’s works continue to rise 

Not only specialized publications highlight the high value of Picasso’s work, but a magazine dedicated to the business world, Dinero, has prepared a report last year, where it points out the prices reached in auction houses for the author’s best-known paintings Malaga. 

In millions of dollars:

The ladies of Avignon, $106.5 M;

Femme Assise Bleu, $45 M

Women of Algiers, $181 M;

Acrobat and young Harlequin, $70 M

Boy with a pipe, $104 M

Another of the famous cubist paintings, from 1932, Femme nue coucheé is another of the works that rank among the most expensive of his creation. It was acquired for 67.54 million dollars last year, 2022, at an auction at Sotheby’s in New York. 

We are excited that the family are bringing Picasso Art to the US to stimulate conversations around creativity and innovation.