According to news site France 24, the postcard was sold at the Gaertner auction house at Bietigheim-Bissingen in southern Germany. This is the highest sum ever paid for a postcard.
The postcard was sent by Pablo Picasso to a friend, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The card is dated September 5, 1918. On the back of the card Picasso has drawn his interpretation of the French town Pau. The town is located at the northern edge of the Pyrenees, some 100 kilometres (62 miles) from the Atlantic ocean.
Pablo Picasso was a multi-talented artist, excelling at painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright. Although Picasso was born in Spain, he lived for most of his life in France. His most admired works include Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which helped usher in the Cubist art movement; and Guernica (1937), a painting of the bombing of Guernica, the Basque town, by the German and Italian air forces in 1937 as part of the Spanish Civil war.
The addressee, Guillaume Apollinaire, is less well known. Apollinaire was an accomplished poet and a champion of the Cubist art movement. He died young, a victim of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Apollinaire’s friendship with Picasso was founded on their mutual interest in Cubism. With Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form.
The irony with the postcard is that it never reached Apollinaire. This was because Picasso addressed the card in Spanish. What happened to the card is uncertain. It ended up in the hands for a French businessman, who decided to put it up for auction. The buyer has not been named, although the purchaser is likely to be living in the U.S.
