Spring auction season enjoys Rosy beginning.

Although this space is generally reserved for art on display in Mexico, when a painting sells for 100 million dollars, it warrants an exception.

When the Sotheby's gavel fell after seven minutes of bidding one night last month in New York, an unidentified buyer had committed US$104 million for a Rose Period Picasso, the haunting "Boy with a Pipe."

The sale made international headlines, as it marks the highest price ever paid for a work of art (Vincent van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet," however, sold for US$82.5 million in 1990, which would exceed US$116 when adjusted for inflation). Many observers on the auction scene--in which the line between business and art is always blurred--say the sale indicated not only a revival in the high-end art market, but the U.S. and international economies in general.

The reasoning stands that if high rollers have millions to drop on oil and canvas, then the elite are in a spending mood, thus fueling employment, investment and pumping up various other macroeconomic indicators.

The list of rumored buyers included various leaders of the banking world, casino owner Stephen Wynn and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Although the Azcarraga family of Televisa fame is well known for its taste in outrageously expensive art and phone bids came in from around the globe, no Mexicans were considered among the contenders for the early Pablo Picasso masterpiece.

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"Boy With a Pipe" (painted in 1904, when the Spaniard was just 24) was the centerpiece of the Whitney Collection, comprised of 34 pieces of superlative Impressionist, American and Modern art belonging to the estate of American blueblood John Hay Whitney and his wife, Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney. When the evening, which kicked off the spring art auction season worldwide, was concluded, US$190 million of art had been sold, the proceeds of which will be donated to the Whitney charity, the Greentree Foundation.

MANET IN THE LIVING ROOM

The collection, one of the largest in American still in private hands, was assembled entirely through inheritance money, first by Payne and Helen Hay Whitney, heirs to a fortune made from oil, tobacco and streetcars, and later by their aforementioned high-living ambassador son, who died in 1982. At her death in 1998, the Roosevelt Whitney widow bequeathed art valued at over US$300 million to several prominent museums.