Sotheby’s to Offer Picasso’s ‘Arlequin (Buste)’ at About $40 Million
A 1909 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) painting from the artist’s Cubist period is heading to Sotheby’s in New York this May, where it is expected to be among the season’s most expensive works. The canvas, ‘Arlequin (Buste),’ is valued in the region of $40 million and comes from the collection of the late Surrealist artist Enrico Donati and his wife, Adele.
The work will appear in Sotheby’s modern art auction on May 19, part of the house’s marquee New York sales. In the painting, a harlequin seems to emerge from a dense field of geometric forms, a visual structure that reflects Picasso’s early Cubist experiments at a moment when he was dismantling traditional figure painting and rebuilding it through fractured planes.
Sotheby’s said the painting has a guarantee and an irrevocable bid, a structure that gives the lot a firmer financial footing than it had in its earlier market appearance. Donati bought the work for about $12,000 in the 1940s, after seeing it at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris and acquiring it through dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, one of Picasso’s most important early champions. The leap from that purchase price to today’s estimate underscores how aggressively the market has reassessed major Cubist works over the past several decades.
This is the second time Sotheby’s has tried to sell ‘Arlequin (Buste).’ The painting reached the auction house in 2008, not long after Donati’s death, and was then estimated at more than $30 million. It was withdrawn a week before the November Impressionist and modern art auction, with Sotheby’s citing only “private reasons.”
The Donati holdings extend well beyond Picasso. Thirteen additional works from the collection are also headed to Sotheby’s, including Wassily Kandinsky’s 1925 abstraction ‘Rote Tiefe (Red Depth),’ estimated at $12 million to $18 million, and Yves Tanguy’s 1939 ‘Aux Aguets le jour,’ estimated at $800,000 to $1.2 million. An untitled Alexander Calder stabile, with a high estimate of $1 million, will appear in a May 20 day sale, while two 19th-century masks — one by a Yup’ik or Inupiaq artist and the other by a Bete-Guro artist — are scheduled for a June 18 sale devoted to art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
For Sotheby’s, the Donati collection offers a concentrated view of 20th-century taste: Cubism, Surrealism, abstraction, and postwar sculpture gathered into a single auction cycle. For collectors, the headline lot is clear, but the broader sale suggests a carefully staged release of works with deep art-historical and market significance.
