Le Rêve (The Dream in French) is a January 24 1932 painting by the 50-year old Pablo Picasso portraying his 22-year old mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. It is said to have been painted in one afternoon. It belongs to Picasso's period of distorted depictions, with its oversimplified outlines and contrasted colors resembling early Fauvism. Walter’s face deliberately can be seen in two perspectives, in one of which she seems to perform fellatio, suggesting that the title of the painting may refer to Picasso’s rather than Walter’s dream.
Provenance
Le Rêve was purchased for $7,000 in 1941 by Victor and Sally Ganz of New York City. This purchase began their 50-year collection of works by just five artists: Picasso, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Eva Hesse. After the Ganzes died (Victor in 1987 and Sally in 1997), their collection, including Le Rêve, was sold at Christie's auction house on November 11, 1997. Le Rêve sold for an unexpectedly high $48.4 million, at the time the sixth most expensive painting sold (tenth when taking inflation into account). The entire collection set a record for the sale of a private collection, bringing $206.5 million. That number is especially impressive considering that the total amount paid by the Ganzes over their lifetime of collecting these pieces was only around $2 million. The buyer who purchased Le Rêve at Christie's in 1997 appears to have been the Austrian-born investment fund manager Wolfgang Flöttl, who also briefly held Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet in possession in the late 1990s [1]. In 2001, under severe financial pressure, he sold Le Rêve to casino magnate Steve Wynn for an undisclosed sum.
Wynn incident
The painting was the centerpiece of Wynn’s collection and he had considered naming his Wynn Las Vegas resort after it. Nevertheless, in October 2006, Wynn told a group of friends, including Barbara Walters, Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, that he had agreed the day before to sell Le Rêve for $139 million to Steven A. Cohen. This price would have been a record at the time. While Wynn was showing the painting to his reporter and columnist guests, apparently just as he was going to reveal the then unknown previous owner, he put his elbow through the canvas, puncturing it in the left forearm of the figure and creating a six-inch tear [2]. Wynn is known for using gestures while speaking and has retinitis pigmentosa, which affects his peripheral vision. Later, Wynn said that he took the event as a sign not to sell the painting. After a $90k repair, the painting was evaluated to be worth $85 million. Wynn proceeded to claim the $54 million difference with the virtual selling price from his insurers, mostly based in Lloyd's of London, so that the incident would have earned him more money than he probably had paid for the painting in the first place, while keeping the work of art in his office. When the insurers balked, Wynn sued them in January 2007. The case was eventually settled out of court in April 2007. [3] [4] [5] [6]
Picasso at Wiktionary • 
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Picasso at Wikinews
