A precious painting by Pablo Picasso was the announced star of Sotheby’s upcoming auction to be held on 3rd November in New York. In just a few days Sotheby’s will put up for auction all high-level proposals, in the session dedicated to impressionist and modern art, which includes in its élitist range of choices various pieces by Degas, Munch, Matisse, Van Gogh, Monet, Kandinskij and Picasso.
Yesterday, a sudden and unexpected change of course was announced, then published on the New York Times, regarding the piece that was considered one of the highlights of the event: Picasso’s “Arlequin” from 1909 has been withdrawn from the auction; this painting was estimated at more than 30 million dollars, equivalent to about 24 million euros.
The harlequin in question seems to have been one of the most expensive works to be offered at a high level auction recently and it had already been included in the auction catalogue sent to likely buyers.  
The reasons for this decision made so close to the auction date have not found an exhaustive answer.  David Norman, executive deputy chairman and co-director of the department of impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s, has talked about the seller, who could not be reached, stating briefly that the painting would have been withdrawn for “private reasons”.  Actually, rumours had been circulating in the last few weeks about a possible withdrawal of the work, probably caused by the fear of a collapse of prices in art, especially in virtue of this particular moment dominated by the concern of a possible crisis of the art market hauled by the financial crisis. 
When Sotheby’s announced that in September it would have sold the painting, the auction house executives declared that it would have been sold without a guarantee – a reserved amount promised to the seller independently from the result of the sale, although auction experts had said that both Sotheby’s and Christie’s were willing to offer a guarantee, as well as other types of financing.  Ultimately, it seems that the painting was supposed to be offered at auction without guarantee, but with a precise clause annexed to the sale contract, with the right for the seller to withdraw the work.
The 73×60 cm painting, portraying a harlequin with its chin resting on its hand, had belonged to the American surrealist artist, of Italian origins, Enrico Donati who had bought it under particular circumstances for 12 million dollars in the late Forties. Donati, who died at the age of 99 years old in New York last April, had bought the famous painting after a visit to the Museum of modern art in Paris, where he saw a precocious cubist work by Picasso and was so impressed by it that he immediately went to Louise Leiris’s gallery, which had loaned the painting.  There, someone opened up to him the locked door of the gallery: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Leiris’s brother-in-law and renowned dealer, whom he had met through their common friendship with Marcel Duchamp.  So Donati bought the painting for himself before returning to New York. 
Harlequin is a frequent iconographic theme in Picasso’s production and it was not abandoned during the various seasons of his artistic career: enigmatic, sinister and at the same time ludic figure, camouflaged and shaded under a grid of lines that seem to prevent the spectator from reading distinctly its true nature, in which the Spanish artist always identified himself. 
The canvas dating from 1909, painted only two years after the composition of the Demoiselles d’Avignon, is a wonderful example of the phase of Picassian analytic cubism, in which the artist’s only belief was represented by the decomposition of planes and volumes, attributing to each single fragment of the subject represented independence of light and space, yet with respect for the whole image. Warm amber colours and pinks are alternated with a sharp jade tone in a compositional rhythm that recalls the works composed during the period of his relationship with Fernande Olivier. 
At the moment the question concerning the withdrawn painting is whether there is a concrete possibility that it might be sold privately, curiosity to which David Norman gave an answer, still diplomatically, by stating that the work is not on the market just for the time being.

(translated by Giorgina Arcuri)