Le Rêve

Pablo Picasso, 1932

Oil on canvas

51 x 39 in

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"It’s a picture, it’s my picture, we’ll fix it. Nobody got sick or died. It’s a picture. It took Picasso five hours to paint it.”

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- Casino owner Steve Wynn just hours after inadvertantly puncturing a hole in the painting he had just agreed to sell for $139 million.

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Le Reve was painted in 1932 by a then 50 year old Pablo Picasso and portrays his 22 year old mistress Marie Therese Walter. Rumored to have been painted in a single afternoon, the simplified outlines and distorted features are hallmarks of early cubism.

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In 1941 the painting became the first acquisition of legendary art collectors Victor and Sally Ganz who, over the next 50 years, would amass a collection of works by just 5 artists: Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Eve Hesse, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. The collection, which cost the couple $2 million, was sold upon Sally’s passing in 1997 for $206.5 million.

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Eventually the work was acquired in 2001 by Casino owner Steve Wynn who, after displaying it proudly inside his casino, agreed to sell it Steve Cohen for $139 million in 2006. Just prior to the sale, Wynn decided to take some friends who were visiting from New York - David and Mary Boies, Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi, Louise Grunwald and Barbara Walters, to see the painting one last time. It was then, in his office as he was telling the story of the painting’s provenance that Wynn, who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, inadvertently backed up too close to the painting, waved an arm and punched a silver dollar sized hole in the canvas with his elbow.

The sale was canceled and after being expertly repaired, Wynn held the painting for another 7 years before eventually agreeing to sell it to Cohen for $155 million.