Letter to the Parish

Have we got our values right?

I never thought I’d be so interested in art, and ever be writing a piece for the parish magazine about a painting; but here I am doing just that! Two days ago, at Christie’s auction house in New York, a Picasso painting – "Women in Algiers" version O – sold for an incredible £102.6m. With commission added on this came to an eye-watering £115m ($179m) in just eleven minutes of bidding at auction.

The Picasso oil painting is a vibrant, cubist depiction of nude courtesans, and is part of a 15-work series the Spanish artist created in 1954-55 designated with the letters A to O. (So I’ve learnt, looking it up on-line!) "This is an absolutely blockbuster picture - it’s one of the most exciting pictures that we’ve seen on the market for 10 years," Philip Hoffman, founder and CEO of the Fine Art Fund Group has said. Will Gompertz, the BBC art editor, in a piece about the painting wrote, "In Women of Algiers version O, Picasso has distilled all of these ingredients into one large-scale painting of great quality: a study not only of the Arabesque, but also a serious enquiry into the nature of colour, line and composition." Going on, "Make no mistake; this is a fine painting, by a great artist, produced at an important time in his career."

But £115m for a painting! In fact, the whole auction entitled, "Christie’s Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary art" achieved total sales of £419,714,468 in one evening. The sale of the Picasso painting was carried in the same BBC television News programme as the news of the second earthquake to hit Nepal in two weeks, and the struggle to raise the millions of pounds needed for the humanitarian aid for the people of that country. The first quake, having claimed the lives of at least seven and a half thousand people and made thousands and thousands of people homeless, and affecting an estimated 6.6m people; this second quake added to their misery and problems. The last figure I heard for the aid required in Nepal was £450m.

The paintings and other art in the sale may have been good – personally, the Picasso painting does nothing for me – but there is something wrong with our sense of values as a society when we can report art sales of £419m in one breath and struggling to raise the £450m to help fellow human beings in the next breath. That has nothing to do with one’s views on faith, religion or church; it is just wrong. (And don’t get me started on the salaries of professional footballers!) Please may we live in a society where we care for our fellow human beings, wherever they are, and not in one where a painting is valued so grossly.

Revd. David Commander
Rector