3 Picasso Sketches Sold At Bloomington Auction

By Anna Deem in News on Nov 29, 2009 10:00PM

Three sketches by Pablo Picasso were sold for $36,000 in less than two minutes at Bloomington Auction Gallery's annual after-Thanksgiving estate event in central Illinois. The sketches were pieces of a dust cover for the 1954 French book, "Picasso and The Human Comedy," depicting Picasso's wife, Olga, a male nude, and a flute player and his mistress. Jason Penny, the auction manager, told the Chicago Sun-Times that he wasn't surprised that the tattered drawings largely went unnoticed by auction-goers, with most of the traffic coming in by phone and online. The names of the buyer and seller weren't disclosed.