Taxes and productivity lessons from Pablo Picasso

The Picasso museum in Paris is built on inheritance tax, according to a sign there. Pablo Picasso died in 1973 and his children had to give paintings to the French government or pay estate taxes that would certainly have exceeded their ability to pay (since the paintings that they had in their houses, gifts from their dad, were valuable but hadn’t been sold voluntarily).

For those who are concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to handle the demanding job of president more than 60 years after his defeat of Corn Pop, here’s some comfort: Picasso (born 1881) was cranking out as many as 2 paintings per week at 90 years old:

Maybe the wife, 46 years younger, assisted?

Speaking of Picasso and younger humans who identified as female, here are some photos from October 2022 taken in the National Gallery (London):

The curators tell us the married 45-year-old artist was having sex with a 17-year-old and, perhaps after consultation with Kentaji’s panel of biologists, that this 17-year-old can be characterized as a “woman”. Yet when something sexual happens with a 17-year-old today, he/she/ze/they is typically characterized as a “child” (example regarding a 36-year-old who supposedly had sex with a 17-year-old; from Australia: a teacher in his 30s having sex with a 17-year-old “young girl” and “child”). Why hasn’t Picasso been canceled or at least devalued? Is it worth paying $100 million to have a work by a child molester on your wall? Why not invest in a Hunter Biden instead, at a $99.5 million savings? Why would a collector want to be reminded of Picasso’s reprehensible actions every time that he/she/ze/they looks at his/her/zir/their living room wall?

Circling back to the productivity-in-old-age topic, if Joe Biden is the “Picasso of Government Spending”, should the “Picasso of the Art World”‘s staggering late-life productivity give us confidence in President Biden as a hands-on leader?

Finally, let me say that I loved the museum. Below we can see two guys who decided to improve their primitive masks’ seals against an aerosol virus by not shaving their beards (this is after deciding to head into crowded indoor art museums as part of the COVID-free lifestyle):

And here’s a patron on the rooftop deck who shows how exciting 100-year-old paintings can be:

10 thoughts on “Taxes and productivity lessons from Pablo Picasso

  1. From the inset photo: “…incoherent doodles done by a frenetic old man in the anteroom of death.”

    I remember reading Kurt Vonnegut’s penultimate novel “Hocus Pocus” in 1992 (it was published late in ’91) and I attended one of his last visiting lectures at a pretty good school. It actually was pretty incoherent, and I distinctly remember some attendees muttering that he was not very far from having one foot in the grave. Also at the time, I remember him complaining ruefully that Salman Rushdie had read Hocus Pocus, damned it with extremely faint praise, and called Vonnegut “…a burned out case.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hocus_Pocus_(novel)

    I actually enjoyed Hocus Pocus and I still recommend it. It has 4.5 stars on Amazon now. My copy is one of the original paperbacks with the clever “show and tell” front cover. College.

    https://www.amazon.com/Hocus-Pocus-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/0425130215

    How very French that the government decided to essentially confiscate (with a smile) some of Picasso’s most valuable works to fund the museum, instead of sponsoring a fund drive of some sort, so that his heirs could keep them and/or sell them as they chose. Surely they could have raised enough money through a kind of GoFundMe equivalent to endow the museum. I wonder what his heirs really thought about that. I don’t speak French well enough to imagine the language they might have used.

    • Vonnegut was always incoherent as a writer. What of his was paid attention to was written at a particular time and reflected the incoherent zeitgeist of that time — the 1960s.

    • @Ricky: I agree with that in general but at least in his earlier works (and in Hocus Pocus at some points) he had a way of painting vivid mental pictures, along with a lot of good zingers. HP is sloppy but it has its moments, in other words, and I think Salman was too harsh on poor Kurt. I do think he appealed to people who were themselves a bit incoherent, kind of wandering through their world while trying to piece together “what was going on” and connect it with the past.

      The lecture he gave – if it can be called that – was a mess, with him shuffling through papers and reading and saying things that were like some kind of kaleidoscope crossed with a jigsaw puzzle. I guess all those things meant something important to him at the time.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/156grw/why_they_read_hesse/

      [NOTE: you have to ZOOM IN to read the essay, it’s presented as a photograph and looks tiny but if you zoom the browser, the image’s resolution is high enough to read.]

      As for Picasso – I’ve never been a big fan or connoisseur of his works. One of my bosses had a big replica of “Guernica” on her wall as the Dean of a law school. She was most definitely a child of the mid-late 1960s and was deeply influenced by the Vietnam War, which is probably why I make the association. For her, Picasso represented “old soul antiwar” since Guernica was painted in 1937 with all of its references to the Spanish Civil War.

  2. If a hand-painted Picasso with worth $100M, how many bitcoins is an AI-generated “cat in Picasso style” worth? Or an “snowman in Monet style”?

    Picasso Cat: https://imgur.com/a/1GEBzRE
    Monet Snowman: hhttps://imgur.com/fgolFDi

  3. France’s taxation is very generous compared to US. They have no capital gains tax on a primary residence. Being able to get rid of property to avoid inheritance tax sounds like a deal.

  4. I hope (but doubt) that you obtained the sleeping person’s permission to display their image!

    • Bernie: Why seek to obtain a model release or other permission from the sleeping subject and not from the bearded and masked heroes?

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