Some history-making jewelry goes up for sale this month – a cache of brooches, rings, and amulets that Pablo Picasso decorated for his lover Dora Maar, who died last summer. Maar’s estate goes on auction – along with 10 paintings and 50 drawings – at Maison de la Chime in Paris on Oct. 27-29. The jewelry goes on the block Oct. 28.
Though the portraits and most of the mementos were in Maar’s home for 60 years, few knew about the jewelry until it was discovered upon her death last year. Marc Blondeau, founding director of Sotheby’s Paris, helped catalog the items early this year in Maar’s apartment on Rue de Savoie in Paris, where she lived during her liaison with Picasso from 1936 to 1945.
“The jewelry was all over the place, under beds, in old shoeboxes,” says Blondeau. “She kept it very zealously as a memento to Picasso.”
Even experts in modernist jewelry wer