Picasso: Trading on Le Reve

The sands of art world time and money are shifting again. SAC’s (hedge fund) founder Steven A. Cohen has just bought a Picasso. Still enmeshed in a legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission over insider trading – offering a $616 million settlement so long as there is no admission of guilt – Cohen purchased a $60 million home in East Hampton in which he will presumably hang “Le Réve” (The Dream) (above) by Pablo Picasso.

Cohen purchased it in 2013 from Stephen A. Wynn (casino entrepreneur) for $155 million and it is now the most expensive piece of paint and canvas ever. In 2007, Wynn notoriously pushed his elbow through the painting during an animated conversation in his office in Las Vegas. Now repaired, and the gash Wynn made in the art work (mostly) invisible, the painting has been sold to Cohen for a record price six years later.

“La Réve” was in Mr. Wynn’s collection since 2001, so he may have thought it was about time he moved it. He’d looked at it long enough, perhaps. Or he wanted to make room for another work of art in his “vast”  art collection, as it was described in The New York Times. Or, as a gambling man - a superstitious lot - , he may have seen the whole elbow-through-the-painting incident as a harbinger of bad luck, cutting into his pleasure of ownership.

Cohen is not known as an insightful art collector, although now he may have a claim to that reputation. But no matter how he's called, he’ll always be better known as a profiteer. We conceive of him as a flamboyant money maniac. But that’s a preconception. Surely not all multi-billionaires who own the most expensive  duplex apartment in Manhattan - now up for sale at $115 million - can be objects of ridicule and even disdain. They must be at least part human, and therefore subject to some of the same joys and sadnesses as other members of our species. Yet, they manage to keep it to themselves, no doubt comforted by the beauty of their vast art collections.

Picasso, also a very wealthy man, was  a man of strong emotions, from cool to sentimental. This may be what Cohen and Wynn have in common with the modern master, but lacking his creative talent and instead having in abundance a talent for extracting crumbs from the cake, like Gordon Gekko.

As to “Le Réve”(51 x 38 inches)  (1932), it is an excellent example of the artist’s late synthetic style, with a clearly erotic theme.  It will look fine hanging on a wall in one of Mr. Cohen's homes.Stephen Wynn and Le Reve