Collector Walls: The adventures of a Picasso painted in wartime Paris.
“Le Marin,” created when the artist’s life was under threat, has had some narrow escapes of its own.
W hen the photographer Lee Miller went to see Picasso in his Rue des Grands-Augustins studio in August of 1944, there was a sense of euphoria in the air. Her visit came just days after the liberation of Paris; the city was finally free after four years under Nazi occupation. Light streamed through the windows of the studio, revealing stacks of paintings lining the walls, all of which had never been seen by the outside world.
To capture the moment, Miller pulled out her Rolleiflex camera. Picasso chose to position himself next to “Le Marin,” a painting of a sailor, wearing a striped shirt, caught in a moment of contemplation. It is perhaps no coincidence that this was the work Picasso chose to stand beside: the painting is widely considered to be a self-portrait, a reflection of his wartime psyche. The closer you look at the photograph, the more you begin to see the resemblance between the two. Picasso even has a hand raised—holding a cigarette, of course—as if to mirror the raised hand of the painting’s subject.
“Le Marin” was created the previous year, in October 1943. The painting emerged out of a life-threatening moment for the Spanish painter, while he was waiting out World War II in his studio. The Nazis, who considered him a “degenerate artist,” had plotted to deport Picasso to a concentration camp, as revealed in letters obtained by Archive Picasso, dated just five weeks before he painted “Le Marin.” He narrowly escaped thanks to an intervention by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor, who spoke to Hitler on Picasso’s behalf.
Miller’s photograph marks the beginning of a journey that would take the painting across three continents.
In 1946, “Le Marin” traveled from Paris to New York, having been acquired by Samuel Kootz, a lawyer-turned-art dealer who had a keen eye for Picasso’s work. The painting was to be one of the central pieces in Kootz’s 1947 exhibition, which marked Picasso’s first post-war showing of new paintings in America. Soon after the show, Kootz sold the painting to Harry Abrams, a pioneering publisher who popularized quality art books.
Just a few years into Abrams’ ownership, in February 1952, he received an offer from a man named Victor Ganz. Then unknown to most in the art world, Ganz would go down in history as one of the most important art collectors of the 20th century. The owner of a small costume jewelry company, he was short in height but grand in ambition and had a particular knack for negotiation. He convinced Abrams to part with the painting for $11,000.
“Le Marin” was one in a series of acquisitions by Ganz and his wife, Sally, that led them to amass the most significant private collection of Picassos in the U.S. during their lifetime. The couple had a golden touch when it came to collecting—even the legendary dealer Leo Castelli idolized them, calling Victor “the best collector we ever had.” In the Ganzes’ New York living room, “Le Marin” hung beside four other Picassos: two preparatory drawings and two important paintings. Hanging above the fireplace was a rare landscape, which was a personal favorite of fellow artist, Henri Matisse. On the far right wall was a painting from Picasso’s radical Cubist period, which is now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art’s collection. No single wall in the Ganzes’ apartment was left empty, and you could assume that every room had at least one Picasso in it.
Fast forward to 1997, when the painting found its way to Christie’s, where it sold for $8.8 million. The buyer was U.S. real estate developer Steve Wynn, who once accidentally elbowed another of his Picassos, “Le Rêve,” which coincidentally was also from the Ganzes’ collection.
“Le Marin” remained in Wynn’s possession for two decades, until he decided to take it back to Christie’s in 2018, this time with a significantly larger estimate in the region of $70 million. However, disaster struck again for Wynn when an extension rod, left leaning against a wall by a freelance wall painter, slipped and punctured a four-and-a-half-inch hole in the canvas. The freak accident caused a stir in the media, and the painting was immediately pulled from the auction. A hefty, half-million dollar restoration brought the Picasso back to its former glory.
The following year, a New York-based gallery sold the painting to Pierre Chen, founder and chairman of Yageo, a Taiwanese electronics company. Chen has emerged as one of the mega-collectors of the 21st century, slowly gathering a series of masterworks, which are housed within his minimalist Studio Liaigre-designed apartment in Taipei.
“Visually, it is one of the most powerful paintings by Picasso that I have ever seen,” Chen says, “the lonesome figure in Picasso’s iconic Breton-striped shirt framed inside that large canvas; there is a raw power that reflects the context of its creation. The portrait embodies a kind of turmoil and anxiety that I think is very much part of the human experience.”
“Le Marin” hangs alone at the end of Chen’s hallway. A single light softly illuminates its surface, conjuring up a similar mood to the Rue des Grands-Augustins studio where it was first created.
