This time it’s because several artworks in the show, which the museum claimed were by Pablo Picasso, are actually fakes. It turns out they were painted by artist and curator Kirsha Kaechele, the wife of Mona’s wealthy owner, David Walsh.

Mona came clean to the Guardian Australia on Wednesday after suspicion was raised by the newspaper and the Picasso Administration.

Kaechele curated “Ladies Lounge,” which opened in 2020 and involved the female-only audience being pampered by performing male butlers and served champagne. The fake Picassos were moved from the lounge to a ladies’ toilet cubicle in the museum after a court ruled that the exhibition was discriminatory and must admit men. The case was brought by an Australian man who claimed that the show discriminated his gender because it violated Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act.

In court, Kaechele said the exhibition was “a response to the lived experience of women forbidden from entering certain spaces throughout history.” She also reportedly said she was “delighted” upon learning that Mona was being sued.

Before owning up to the forgeries, Mona said that Kaechele inherited the artworks from her great-grandmother, whom she claimed was once a lover of Picasso. One of the paintings is a replica of Luncheon on the Grass, After Manet (1961) by the Spanish painter.

Kaechele also admitted that other works displayed in “Ladies Lounge” were not genuine, including “antique” spears and a rug that the museum said belonged to Queen Mary of Denmark.

She wrote in a blog post that she forged the paintings when the installation was created because “it had to be as opulent and sumptuous as possible… if men were to feel as excluded as possible, the Lounge would need to display the most important artworks in the world – the very best.” Kaechele added that she “knew of a number of Picasso paintings [she] could borrow from friends, but none of them were green, and [she] wished for the Lounge to be monochrome.” She also wrote she didn’t want to pay for the insuring real Picassos.

At the end of her post, she apologizes to the Picasso Administration, which manages the late painter’s estate. “I am very very sorry for causing you this problem,” she wrote in French.

The partnership will officially launch with the Christie’s Prints and Multiples auction in New York on April 16. According to a spokesperson, Art Money can be used for works up to $1 million. 

In order to take advantage of the initiative, collectors must first be approved by Art Money, which involves choosing an amount of credit followed by a soft credit check. Once approved, a winning bidder uploads their invoice from Christie’s to Art Money and accepts the purchase offer. Then the auction house and consigner get paid, the work gets delivered, and the installment payments begin. 

Art Money makes money by charging a flat monthly fee of up to 10% of the final cost of the work for its services, which is spread over the monthly payments. That means a collector who’s successfully bid on a $10,000 work would pay $11,000 for total, $1,100 over ten months. (That final price would include all auction house fees and buyer’s premium.)

Art Money was founded in 2014 and then launched in the US in 2016 during Expo Chicago. By the end of that year it had partnered with the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair in Miami. According to Art Money’s website they currently have more than 2,000 partners, include boutique and mainstream galleries including Anat Ebgi, Various Small Fires, The Hole, and Galerie Lelong. 

According to Art Money, the financing program will extend to future Christie’s sales, including the forthcoming May sales. Among the works on offer at Christie’s Prints and Multiples auction are a Picasso etching, Femme nue à la guitare, from Le Siège de Jérusalem: Grande tentation céleste de Saint Matorel (1913) estimated to sell for between $2,000 and $3,000, an edition of Henri Matisse’s 1947 “Jazz” portfolio for $600,000-$800,000, and a Brice Marden etching from 1961 for between $6,000 and $8,000.

According to Reuters, the giant banner is based on an illustration by the artist Shephard Fairey and on a photograph taken by the Gaza-born photographer Belal Khaled.

The image was captioned with the phrase “Can you hear us?” and below, a hung a yellow banner that read CEASEFIRE NOW in bold black letters.

Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, have been engaged in a brutal conflict since October 7, 2023, when Hamas’s paramilitary wings launched over 3,000 rockets into Israeli territory stormed the Israeli border, ultimately killing nearly 1,200 and taking 250 hostages.

Since then, Israel has engaged in a fierce ground offensive in Gaza, displacing much of the population; demolishing homes, schools, and hospitals; and killing more than 25,000 people, according to the local health ministry. Israel’s actions have prompted South Africa to file suit against Israel in the International Criminal Court, alleging genocide against the Palestinian people.

On Wednesday, an Israeli government spokesperson said there would be no ceasefire despite calls for Israel to end its assault against Gaza coming from activists and governments across the globe, according to the Guardian.

The Reina Sofía holds Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, an iconic painting that depicts the violence suffered during the Spanish Civil War. Since it was painted in 1937, the painting has become a widely seen symbol at antiwar protests held around the world.

The Guardian said Picasso’s “appeal is as a picaresque who left a trail of destruction in his wake: abandonments, betrayals, suicides.” ARTnews, in a comprehensive roundup of the Picasso-mania, said the “glut of exhibitions in 2023 taught us absolutely nothing.”

But not all shows are the same, and there are as many ways of organizing a show as there are paintings.

At Gagosian, through February 10, is the most unique Picasso show among the droves, “A Foreigner Called Picasso.“ Organized by the writer and historian Annie Cohen-Solal and the art historian Vérane Tasseau, the show looks at Picasso’s life as an immigrant in France, a country riddled with xenophobia—hardly the normal angle for a show about the artist. (Or a book, for that matter: Cohen-Solal also published a related Picasso biography with a similar title that has garnered acclaim in both France and the US.)

Shortly after arriving in Paris, in 1900, from his hometown in Málaga, Spain, Picasso became a target. Like the torrent of Spanish immigrants before him, the 19-year-old painter settled down in Montmartre, where he was surrounded by people who spoke his language. Within a year, thanks to his relationship with the art dealer and anarchist Pierre Mañach, Picasso was surveilled by the police who, like the Académie des Beaux Arts, couldn’t trust a foreigner who mingled with political radicals, lived in a slum in a filthy neighborhood, and, worst of all, embraced the avant-garde. 

Following the the opening of France’s National Museum of Immigration in 2015, Cohen-Solal was given access to the file on Picasso that police began compiling shortly after he arrived in France. 

“I became very intimate with the files and learned that alongside this genius of an artist, there was a genius political strategist who gave himself agency in a culture and country that rejected him at every turn,” Cohen-Solal told ARTnews.

At the time, France was experiencing waves of xenophobia. In 1894, French president Sadi Carnot was assassinated by an Italian national and avowed anarchist; that same year was the one that kicked off the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish French Army captain was wrongly convicted of sending military secrets to the Germans.

Cohen-Solal said she wanted to view Picasso from the perspective of that anti-foreigner sentiment. Essentially, she put his life before his art.

“I love art historians,” Cohen-Solal said, “but they are always tempted to keep Picasso for themselves and look at him through a prism of formalism. I want to open Picasso as a subject to the social scientists, anthropologists, economists. If you let him breathe, he is a jewel to work from.”

“The show isn’t so much about Picasso’s work, but about his life and how he was able to navigate a system that was working against him,” said Gagosian director Michael Cary.

Wall text gives context to the show’s galleries, which each cover a portion of the years between 1900 and 1973 that Picasso spent in France. But unlike a traditional museum show, the works hang far from their titles, which means visitors must piece together the narrative, without contextual information. (Many of the works came from private collections and museum loans, thanks to Larry Gagosian’s far-reaching influence.)

Some of the standouts are set in a section covering the years 1919–1939, shows how much the artist developed as a “persona non grata” who was labeled “a ‘foreigner’ in France, a ‘degenerate’ artist in Nazi Germany, an ‘enemy’ under Franco’s Spain” and includes many of Picasso’s most famous subjects in Classic, Cubist, Surrealist styles. The mélange of styles in this gallery says quite a bit about where Picasso was an artist at the time.

After the outbreak of World War I Picasso’s first dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, was forced out of France thanks to his German citizenship. Kahnweiler’s decision to live in exile in Switzerland effectively canceled whatever contract he had with Picasso, who then began working with the dealer Paul Rosenberg. “But his relationship with Rosenberg is interesting because Rosenberg didn’t like Cubism,” Cary said during a walk through of the show. “And so there’s a little bit of a strategy involved where Picasso may have been trying out different styles responding to all Rosenberg’s needs for his clientele.” While that section of the show highlights Picasso’s mastery of neoclassical painting still lives on top of the Cubism he pioneered, it also reveals an often overlooked detail about the painter. There was a time when he, like everyone else, worked for money and likely understood that the customer is always right.

“Picasso wasn’t a ‘genius,’ he wasn’t a ‘monster’—he was an artist,” Cary told ARTnews later via email, noting that a really prolific artist may make 5,000 works in a lifetime whereas Picasso made 25,000. “You could have visited every exhibition across Europe and the US for the anniversary year (2023) and only scratched the surface of his oeuvre.”

But have there really been too many Picasso shows? Yes and no, Cary said.

“Picasso fatigue is a real thing (especially among Picasso scholars!),” he added. “You may grow tired of thinking about Picasso…but the only way through it is to look again. Thinking and reading and writing about Picasso is not equivalent to that empirical experience. Not even close. To look, we need pictures hanging on walls—everywhere and always and over and over again. I may not always want to talk about Picasso, but I’ll always want to see it.”

Cecile Debray, president of the Picasso Museum in Paris, would likely agree with Cary. She sees the Gagosian show as one of the many new approaches to Picasso’s work. “Turning Point,” an exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía organized by Eugenio Carmona, also stands out, she told ARTnews, for considering Picasso’s “radical approach to the body” and how many of his figures were what today would be called “gender fluid.”

When asked about the famously botched “Pablo-matic” show at the Brooklyn Museum, for which the Picasso Museum loaned a few works, Debray said she thought “they would work more precisely on the question of femininity.”

Debray called for a complex reading of Picasso’s representations of women. In the 1970s and ’80s, the art historian Rosalind Krauss praised Picasso, she pointed out, and spoke about separating the woman and the art and justified political readings of Picasso’s work. “Now, it’s totally the opposite,” according to Debray. “You only have biographical readings. Young people and neo-feminists only see women suffering.” 

However, the Brooklyn Museum show was important to the debate, she said, as are shows based on historical aspects, like a presentation of El Greco and Picasso at the Prado and a survey of his drawings at the Centre Pompidou.

“When you think you know everything about Picasso, you’re wrong,” she said. “There is always something new to discover.”

According to the Seattle Fire Department, someone likely lit the fire in an alley behind the gallery to ward off the cold and it subsequently spread to the three-story building. No one was injured, but Davidson Galleries manager Rebecca McDonald told CNN that several prized pieces in their collection were damaged or destroyed.

“Much of the work, we hope, will be saved. We’re triaging them now,” McDonald said, adding that it will be weeks before the extent of the damage is undetermined. Davidson Galleries is known for selling works on paper, and it had planned to move most of its inventory from Seattle’s Pioneer Square to a new space the nearby 85 Yesler Way. In preparation for the move, many precious pieces had been removed from storage, leaving them unusually vulnerable to disaster.

“I feel saddest for the contemporary artists who have trusted us with their works,” gallery owner Sam Davidson said in a statement. “Until I got there and saw it myself, I didn’t get the full impact. It is very dramatic when you walk in the gallery. It’s just so black in there.”

The gallery team shared on Facebook that some artworks had been damaged by smoke. “We are currently in the process of assessing the extent of the damage. However, it was not as extensive as initially thought, and we are hopeful that we will be able to preserve the vast majority of our inventory,” the post read.

Per CNN affiliate Kiro 7, many works in the collection were shielded from smoke damage by rag mats and mylar sheets, and responding firefighters were praised by the gallery for their preservation efforts while dousing the blaze.

“It’s the wonderful part of the art community, that they come together when there’s a need,” Davidson said.

Now, that bar has lowered, with a significant drop in the prices of the most expensive works sold at auction in 2023.

Compare this year’s 10th most expensive work to that of 2022. Henri Rousseau’s Les Flamants (1910) sold this past May for $43.5 million, setting a new auction record for him. That’s a little more than half the price of the Magritte sold in 2022.

Signs of a downturn are evident in other ways too. This year, four of the works that generated the year’s top 10 prices overall went for under $50 million—many fewer than last year. Then, consider the most expensive work sold at auction: a Picasso painting that took in $139 million. In 2022, an Andy Warhol “Marilyn” sold for $195 million. That’s a 29 percent difference.

The total figures for the top 10 lots exhibit a similar loss—$660 million in 2023 versus $1.1 billion in 2022.

Below, a look at the most valuable lots sold at auction in 2023.

That $406 million total figure represents one of the highest ever achieved for a single-owner collection at auction. Still, that sum is modest still in comparison to the $676 million brought in from the court-ordered sale of the Macklowe collection, sold at Sotheby’s last fall, and the $646 million total drawn during the sale of David Rockefeller’s collection at Christie’s in 2018.

The Landau auction was what’s called a “white glove sale”, meaning that each and every one of its 31 lots offered were placed with buyers, though it’s worth keeping in mind that each of those lots were backed by third-party guarantees—minimum bids secured by the auction house in deals with outside parties ahead of the sale that are meant to offset financial risk. There were some disappointments and some bright spots: nearly a third of the lots hammered at prices below their low estimates, but new records were set for Agnes Martin and Mark Tansey.

Anchoring the evening sale was a 1932 painting by Pablo Picasso. Bidding for the canvas, depicting Picasso’s early muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, started at $100 million. A few bids brought the hammer price for the work to $121 million. The work eventually went to a bidder on the phone with Brooke Lampley, head of Sotheby’s Global Fine Art division. Ahead of the sale, the painting was offered with an estimate upon request of $120 million. The end result, inclusive of fees, came to $139 million, the second highest price ever achieved for Picasso at auction, below the $179 million paid for Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’), 1955, when it was sold at Christie’s in 2015.

After the Picasso hammered, the sale seemed to lose a bit of momentum. Multiple lots sold for upward of $20 million, but didn’t far surpass the auction house’s expectations for them. Ed Ruscha’s Securing the Last Letter (Boss), a black-ground canvas featuring the word “BOSS” in bold red lettering, brought the second-highest auction price ever for the West Coast artist, going for a total of $39.4 million with fees. The painting hammered just below its $35 million estimate. Following a similar course was a 1958 canvas from Mark Rothko’s heralded series of works commissioned for New York City’s Seagram Building. That work hammered on a bid of $19 million, well below its $30 million estimate. It sold to a bidder on the phone with Sotheby’s Asia chairman Wendy Lim, the final price coming out to $22 million with fees.

Elsewhere in the sale, historically important women artists were a focus. Agnes Martin’s large-scale canvas Grey Stone II (1961), an off-white monochrome painting, was the among the works that saw the deepest bidding of the night. When Barker opened the lot to the room, bids quickly soared, and eventually, the work hammered at a staggering $16 million, more than double its low estimate of $6 million. It went to a determined bidder in the room for a final price of $18.7 million with fees, surpassing Martin’s previous record of $17.7 million, for her painting Untitled #44 at Sotheby’s Macklowe sale last November, and setting a new record for the artist.

Earlier in the night, four bidders battled for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pink Tulip (Abstraction – #77 Tulip), a floral abstraction that she produced in 1925 and that was featured in exhibitions at New York’s Intimate Gallery the following year, when O’Keeffe was still rising as an artist. Landau bought the canvas directly from O’Keeffe in 1985, just a year before the artist’s death. The work went to a bidder in the room for a final price of $4.75 million, hammering over its low estimate of $3 million.

By contrast with Christie’s sale of 21st century art on Tuesday night, living artists were few and far between in the Sotheby’s sale. One standout was Glenn Ligon, whose black-and-white textual work, Untitled (I Lost My Voice, I Found My Voice), hammered at $2.7 million, above the $2.5 million estimate, going for $3.2 million. Landau bought the piece in 1991 and later loaned it to the the artist’s 2011 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum.

“Given the strength of the material I was expecting more,” said collector Max Dolciger, speaking to the sale as a whole. “But it was still a success. People were excited about how fresh the works were and of course about the provenance, but they were still cautious. It has nothing to do with the art. It has to do with where the world is right now and everything going on.”

Offered as the tenth lot in the anticipated sale, Sotheby’s auctioneer Olivier Barker opened the bidding at $100 million, with several bids bringing the hammer price for the work to $121 million. The work eventually went to a bidder on the phone with Brooke Lampley, Head of Sotheby’s Global Fine Art division. Ahead of the sale, the painting was offered with an estimate upon request of $120 million.

A depiction of Picasso’s young muse through much of the 1930s, Marie-Thérèse Walter, the piece has been referred to as “a “definitive” work in Western art history, according to Sotheby’s specialists.

Picasso’s paintings of Walter often fetch the highest prices for the artist’s at auction. Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which was painted the same year, sold for $106.5 million at Christies in May 2010, well above its $70 million estimate. Picasso’s previous record at auction was also made a Christie’s May 2015, when Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) from 1955 sold for $179.4 million, reportedly to the Qatari royal Al Thani family. 

The present painting has changed hands a precious few times since Picasso laid paint to canvas. Landau, who died earlier this year at the age of 102, bought the work from Pace Gallery in 1968. Pace acquired Femme à la montre from Galerie Beyeler in Basel, who bought the work from Picasso, just two years prior, according to the provenance published by Sotheby’s. 

Backed with a financial guarantee from the house, the collection is estimated to generate over $400 million.

Likely the biggest ticket item to be sold from Landau’s estate is Pablo Picasso’s 1932 painting Femme à la montre, a portrait of one of his famous subjects, the young Marie-Thérèse Walter. Works that depict Walter, known in the historical canon as Picasso’s young mistress, often bring in the highest prices for Picasso at auctions. Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s head of Impressionist and Modern Art for the Americas called the Picasso painting a “definitive” work in Western art history.

Other major works that will be sold include Ed Ruscha’s Securing the Last Letter (Boss) from 1964 and an untitled Mark Rothko painting from 1958. The latter work derives from a famed series that Rothko produced on commission for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram building. Sotheby’s is offering each painting with their estimates available only on request.

Another by Jasper John’s titled Flags, produced ten years later in 1968, is expected to fetch $35-45 million. Self Portrait, a 1986 acrylic and silkscreen painting on canvas by Andy Warhol will also be a part of the major offerings. It is expected to fetch a price between $15-20 million. Other works by Willem de Kooning and Georgia O’Keeffe will be offered at lower price points between $3 million to $6 million.

Landau died at the age of 102 this March. A former trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, she began collecting in the 1960s. She’d come to know Ruscha, Rothko, and Johns personally in the years the artists were actively working in their New York studios. Eventually, Landau would go on to acquire works by major modern and contemporary artists, among them: Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Paul Klee and Louise Nevelson. By 2010, she’d donated more than 300 works to the Whitney Museum.

There are big ticket works by living artists too that Landau cultivated. One of them is Glenn Ligon’s 1991 work I Lost My Voice, I Found My Voice. In the work, Ligon splayed blocks of black text using oil and gesso across a white wood panel. The piece was featured in a 2011 mid-career retrospective dedicated to the artist titled “Glenn Ligon: America” at the Whitney. Though Sotheby’s declined to provide an estimate on the work, which will be offered with it’s estimate available only on request, a representative for the house said it would set a new price benchmark for the artist. The standing auction record for Ligon was set in 2014, when his 1990 work Untitled (I was Somebody) sold at Sotheby’s New York during an evening sale for $3.9 million.

A painting by Mark Tansey titled Triumph Over Mastery II from 1987 is expected to bring an artist record too. The oil painting, which depicts a shirtless figure against a red-toned background is expected to fetch $8 million–$12 million. A record for Tansey was last set in 2018, when his 1988 oil painting Source of the Loue sold for $7.5 million in 2018 at Sotheby’s.

In a statement, Sotheby’s global head of the house’s Fine Arts Division, Brooke Lampley said the remaining collection’s biggest draw is its track record in chronicling important U.S. artists. Lampley said the group of works tell “one of the most comprehensive and era-defining narratives of the trajectory of American Art.”

Gambarin has made a name for himself for using a tractor to create portraits of the world’s most famous individuals, plowing their likenesses into 25,000 square meters of earth in Northern Italy. According to The Guardian Gambarin “said he was inspired by Picasso’s 1907 self-portrait to create….the largest portrait of the Spanish artist in the world.”

“I wanted to dedicate this colossal portrait to Picasso because he is one of those masters from whom you never stop learning,” Gambarin told The Straits Times.

In November 2013, the artistic agrarian hewed out the image of U.S President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in a field in Castagnaro in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of his assassination and, in 2016, he plowed a likeness of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s face with the word “ciao” inscribed under his left shoulder, according to The Guardian.

Also, in 2013, he sketched the likeness of Pope Francis after the religious leader announced a day of fasting and prayer for peace in war-torn Syria. His other subjects include South African president and freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, Leonardo da Vinci, and former U.S. President Barack Obama.