Pablo Picasso

A $32.6-million auction of film maker Billy Wilder's collection Monday night at Christie's kicked off a heady week of Impressionist and modern art sales. Enormous prices are on the agenda this week and Christie's and Sotheby's are predicting record sales, but the Wilder affair got off to a shaky start. Several pieces brought less than their low estimates and a few others failed to sell.

In a French bistro in 1904, where famous men come and go, a barman makes a prediction concerning the new century. He tilts up his head and proclaims: "Led by Germany, this will be known as the century of peace! Clothes will be made of wax!" At its pithiest, the distinctive voice of playwright Steve Martin is a tonic for our millennial unease.

The County Museum of Art will be the first American museum to show 45 sketchbooks by Pablo Picasso that amazed even gimlet-eyed experts at their unveiling at New York's Pace Gallery earlier this year. Picasso was the most ferociously inventive of modern innovators. His sketchbooks, to be exhibited at the museum Dec. 16-Jan.

Thieves cut a hole in the roof of Stockholm's Museum of Modern Art and "ripped the heart out" of its Pablo Picasso collection, stealing uninsured artwork worth $52 million. The thieves carried seven framed paintings and a Picasso bronze sculpture out through the roof in one of the biggest art heists in modern history. Two of the paintings were by Georges Braque and five by Picasso. The break-in was discovered Monday morning.

A major Picasso exhibition opened to the public this week in an Istanbul museum best known for its collection of highly stylized Islamic calligraphy. The patroness of the Sakip Sabanci Museum, the head of a multibillion-dollar Turkish conglomerate, said she hoped the show would accelerate Turkey's cultural shift from the ancient, Islamic and Asian to the cutting edge, contemporary and European.

As the result of an out-of-court settlement, Bay Area resident Thomas Bennigson will receive $6.5 million from Marilynn Alsdorf of Chicago for a Pablo Picasso painting reportedly stolen by the Nazis from Bennigson's grandmother years before Alsdorf acquired it in 1975. Additionally, as part of a prior agreement contingent on the settlement, Bennigson will receive a lesser sum from Stephen Hahn -- the art dealer who sold the painting to Alsdorf and her late husband, James.

Casino mogul Steve Wynn lost $139 million but got to keep one of his favorite paintings when he poked a hole in a Picasso last month. Now it will cost Wynn $85,000 to repair the damage to the artwork, if not his pride. "Forget the money," he said. "You hate ... to damage a painting like 'Le Reve.'

A Japanese real estate tycoon paid $48.9 million today to set a world auction record for a painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. But Picasso's "Les Noces de Pierrette" fell short of expectations that it would replace Vincent Van Gogh's "Irises" as the world's most expensive painting. Art experts had predicted that the auction, conducted simultaneously in Paris and Tokyo by a satellite link-up, would break the 1987 Van Gogh record of $53.9 million.

Jacqueline Picasso, the widow of Pablo Picasso, committed suicide Wednesday at the chateau on the French Riviera where the giant of modern art died in 1973, police said. Picasso, 60, was found dead in her bed at 9 a.m. by her maid. An automatic pistol was at her side. Police said the single gunshot wound to the head appeared to have been self-inflicted. The death occurred at Notre Dame de Vie, French for Our Lady of Life, a medieval mountaintop castle at Mougins, a village overlooking Cannes.

As an artist and a personality, Pablo Picasso resembled the Hindu god Shiva, "the destroyer of worlds," intent on outraging orthodoxy and defying tradition whenever possible. So it's ironic and even amusing to watch as "Surviving Picasso" turns his life into a genteel, well-behaved, even conventional piece of filmmaking.