SNAPSHOTS: Pricey Picasso

Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) or Women of Algiers has become the most expensive painting to sell at an auction, bringing down the hammer at $160 million.

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Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) or Women of Algiers.

Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) or Women of Algiers has become the most expensive painting to sell at an auction, bringing down the hammer at $160 million at Christie’s in New York on Monday night. Created around 1955, it is a large-scale, multi-coloured oil of nude courtesans. Critics reading between the lines have spotted a play of aesthetic techniques and geo-politics of the time in the work. The earlier world record for a painting sold at an auction was $142.4 million, for British painter Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud in 2013.

Neel Mukherjee, author of the 2014 book – The Lives of Others.

Award for Others

The run of honours continues for Neel Mukherjee’s 2014 book The Lives of Others. It has won the £10,000 Encore Award for the Best Second Novel in the UK, placing the Kolkata-born writer alongside previous winners such as Anne Enright, Colm Toibin, Ali Smith, Amit Chaudhuri and Julia Leigh.

Set in Kolkata of the ’60s and ’70s, The Lives of Others revolves around a young man, Supratik Ghosh, and his family as the Naxalite movement erupts around them. The book was nominated for the Man Booker Prize last year and lost out to Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Julius Caesar, the play.

Stage Presence

Twelve plays will be staged between May 16 and 24 as part of efforts by the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi to raise funds for earthquake relief in Nepal. The selection ranges from successful musicals such as Ghazab Teri Ada (in which women of a kingdom lodge their protest against war in a unique way) and Kabira Khada Bazar Mein, (about the 14th century Bhakti poet) to the marital thriller Chatuskone and the classic Ghasiram Kotwal. New productions of NSD are also a part of the package, ranging from adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Richard II to Bitter Fruit, a collection of stories by Manto and Franca Rame.

Tickets are priced between Rs 250 and Rs 500 and available at http://www.eticket. nsd.gov.in. Contact: 23389138