PICASSO TO HEADLINE CHRISTIE’S IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN SALE

The dashing figure of a musketeer drawing his rapier, by Pablo Picasso, is among nine of the Spanish painter’s postwar masterpieces expected to fetch more than £8 million ($15 million) at a sale on Monday, Arifa Akbar reports in The Independent. They are being auctioned at Christie’s with fifty-six pieces by prominent Impressionist and modern artists including Edgar Degas and Marc Chagall. The celebrated Homme a l’epee (Man with Sword) was painted in 1969, and it is characteristic of the self-deprecatory humor in a series of works featuring the musketeers and cavaliers.