THE £115M BORDELLO

As this Picasso is sold for a record price, how it exposes his monstrous treatment of women — and the madness of the art world

When the 22-year-old Pablo Picasso settled in a bohemian area of Paris, he hadn’t a centime to his name. he took lodgings in a complex of ramshackle artists’ studios in Montmartre, where his neighbours were dissolute painters, poets, laundrywomen and whores.

The walls dripped, the floorboards were rotten and in winter the water froze in the jugs. he was always hungry, and burnt his drawings to keep warm.

If you’d told him then that, one day, his paintings would be the most valuable in the world, the artist would have given a hollow laugh.

On Monday, at Christie’s auction house in new York, Picasso’s Women Of Algiers, painted on Valentine’s Day, 1955, went for £115 million, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

After an exhilarating 11 minutes of telephone bidding, the auctioneer raised his hands in triumph, then brought the gavel down with the words: ‘It’s yours! Sold!’

The identity of the buyer hasn’t been revealed.

Picasso, who was born in Malaga but forged his later career in France, may be the 20th century’s most notorious artist — inventor of Cubism, chronicler of the Spanish Civil War and with a personal life more wild and colourful even than his art; but can any painting really be worth almost $180 million?

Who are the secretive billionaires placing their bids by phone? Can the art market go on commanding record- breaking prices — or is it heading for a crash?

A BROTHEL FOR A BILLIONAIRE

A NUDE courtesan stands brazenly before us, her breasts and soft stomach are bare, her hair wrapped in an elaborate headdress. A tangle of limbs, breasts and buttocks fill the rest of the canvas, which measures 57 by 45 inches. here are women selling their bodies, many of them faceless, reduced to their constituent anatomical parts.

Picasso began his Women Of Algiers series — this is one of 15 — within a month of the nationalist uprising in Algeria, a French colony, in 1954. It was the beginning of the eight-year Algerian War of Independence.

The artist was partly inspired by an earlier painting, Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834), by the French romantic painter eugene Delacroix, which showed four concubines in a harem sharing a hookah pipe filled with hashish.

Picasso also intended the work as a tribute to French artist henri Matisse, his great friend and rival, who’d recently died.

Matisse was a master of so- called ‘ odalisques’ — exotic, tantalising paintings of women in harems. Travelling to Algeria, Matisse had been half- disgusted, half-trans-fixed by the women in the kasbahs. he wrote to a friend that the capital city, Algiers, was ‘a filthy, stinking Paris that has been inadequately cleaned for years’.

While Matisse’s odalisques are sinuous, seductive creatures, painted in languid poses and warm, stimulating colours, Picasso’s women are fierce and agitated, abstracted to the point of being almost inhuman. he had started visiting Paris brothels in the 1900s, making sketches of the girls he encountered. The figures here are likely to be composites of existing sketches.

JUGGLING THREE MISTRESSES

FEMINIST art historians loathe this picture, which they say is not only misogynistic but colonialist — a white, Western male preying on north African women. Indeed, critics say Picasso ‘cut’ and ‘sliced up’ women in these fragmented paintings.

The truth is that Picasso adored the company of women, but treated them monstrously, picking them up and dropping them without regret.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, he juggled three mistresses — model Marie-Therese Walter, painter Francoise Gilot and photographer Dora Maar — while separated from his ballet dancer wife, Olga.

By the time he came to paint Women Of Algiers, Picasso was more settled. he’d bought a villa at Cannes with his muse Jacqueline Rocque (she was 27; he was 70), whose beauty so obsessed him he painted her portrait more than 400 times.

Such was his power over her, that when he died, she drank heavily and talked to his photo as

if he were still alive. In 1986, she committed suicide with a gunshot to her temple.

CRAZY PRICES

THIS week, more than £1.6 billion of art will be sold in New York. On Monday night, a figure by the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, famed for his skeletal bronzes, set its own record for the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction when it reached £90.6 million.

Tonight, a portrait, Benefits Supervisor Resting by the British artist Lucian Freud, known for his brutally unflattering nudes, is expected to reach £32 million.

Global art market sales last year reached £44 billion — nearly double that of five years ago. The figures for 2015 are set to be even higher.

Melanie Gerlis, of The Art Newspaper, says rising prices cannot last for ever: ‘At some point, people won’t keep paying more. But I’ve been saying that for a long time.’

Of course, in addition to the sale price is Christie’s commission — which, at 12 per cent, puts the total cost of Women Of Algiers at $179.3 million. Then there’ll be the insurance, which can be as much as 2 per cent of a work’s value: so that’s another £2.3 million every year.

When the owner ships the painting home, they’ll face big import duties.

Philip hoffman, of the Fine Art Fund Group, which advises wealthy individuals on purchases, recalls a Brazilian client who bought a Picasso for £39 million in New York.

he wanted to ship it back to Sao Paulo but would have to pay 40 per cent import duties — about £15 million. hoffman advised it would be cheaper to buy an apartment in New York and hang the painting there.

The client called his estate agent.

. . . AND EQUALLY CRAZY BUYERS

SO The BY’S estimate collectors rarely spend more than 1 per cent of their wealth on a single painting. To spend £ 115 million suggests a fortune of £12 billion or more.

Many buyers choose to remain anonymous, careful not to advertise that they have such assets.

Big spenders in recent years are from the Middle east and China, though their tastes are very different.

The Chinese prefer big names: Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Francis Bacon and Picasso. They are also partial to the colour red, which is considered lucky in Chinese culture. Could Women Of Algiers, with its bold flashes of scarlet, be destined for a Beijing billionaire’s walls?

Middle eastern buyers are more conservative, and are investing in Islamic antiquities and paintings by the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne and the American abstract artist Mark Rothko. They rarely buy anything racy.

The Qatari royal family is thought to spend more than £600 million a year on works destined for the museums being built in the desert.

Rich Russians are buying less than before, though Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich and his wife have one of the most valuable private collections of modern art in the world. American buyers are much more flamboyant. Gambling tycoon Steve Winn, for example, displays his collection in his Las Vegas casinos.

HIDDEN AWAY IN BUNKERS

WHILE some works hang in private houses and others go on display in museums, many disappear from public view. Some end up in tax havens stored in climate-controlled warehouses surrounded by concrete walls and protected by fingerprint-scanner entry systems.

HOW YOU CAN BUY A PICASSO

PICASSO was extraordinarily prolific. In his long life ( he died aged 92), he is thought to have produced 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints and engravings, 34,000 book illustrations and 300 sculptures.

That’s before you include what dealers call his ‘scraps’: sketches on matchbox lids, doodles on torn napkins and carved pebbles.

In the 1990s, Dora Maar, one of Picasso’s mistresses, sold hundreds of tiny objects from her collection. One was a torn paper figure (with cigarette burns) which sold for £1,500.

In March, a collection of Picasso ceramics went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London, with some lots selling for as little as £1,375.