A trophy, and a scandal
For a painting about a sleepy village, the Horta has led a dramatic life. It made its way, in time, into one of the greatest private collections in America — that of Nelson Rockefeller, the financier and future US vice-president — and on his death in 1979 it was bequeathed to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where for decades it hung as a landmark of early Cubism.
And then, in 2003, MoMA sold it. Museums do this — they call it deaccessioning, quietly selling one work to buy others — but selling a Cubist cornerstone bequeathed by a Rockefeller struck a number of critics as something close to vandalism — Picasso’s own great biographer, John Richardson, was loudly among the appalled. The painting went, reportedly for $12–15 million and through a New York dealer, to the Berlin-born collector Heinz Berggruen, a man who had spent a lifetime buying Picasso.
Where it lives now
So the picture ended up in Berlin, at the Museum Berggruen, which calls it one of the most significant works it owns. Stand in front of it there and you see what the Rockefellers and the Berggruens paid fortunes for: a hot ochre hillside of stacked cubes, one stubborn green tree, and no real sky at all. There is a neat symmetry in the journey: a painting made in the poorest corner of Picasso’s Spain, fought over by the richest museums of the next century, and finally settled in a German palace of modern art. The houses on the hill never moved. Everything around them — money, fame, the whole apparatus of the twentieth-century art world — was built on top of summers like this one.