It was an anonymous bidder who carried home Picasso's 1932 picture Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, at Christie's Auctions in New York this May. The price paid was $106.5m; just a shade more - $2.3m, to be precise - than was paid for the Picasso's Garcon a la Pipe (1905), in 2004. The price tag was also enough to give that anonymous bidder the pleasure of having staked more on art, and having celebrated it more loudly, than anyone else would care to do. Of course, one can only speculate on the identity of this secret titan, but the mind inevitably conjures images of older men, of giants who have made their wealth in the grime of industry: because only such types seem to want to love art in quite this way.

Auction records are an eccentric phenomenon, and a poor guide to the quality of art. But popular interest in them is something Picasso himself would have understood. Maybe not in his youth; when you walk into the first rooms of the Metropolitan's new Picasso exhibition, you see the typical themes and diversions of a younger, humbler man: designs for posters advertising dance halls, like Le Jardin de Paris, from 1902, show us how close he was to the popular arts of the day. And so many of his Blue Period works indicate his perceived kinship with the poor and the outcast, as seen in Woman Ironing, from 1901, or The Blind Man's Meal, from 1903. Some pictures from this period may even have been inspired by the patients in a hospital for women with venereal disease. But like so many who grow old, Picasso's sympathies shifted. In the 1920, as he entered his forties, and after fathering a son, he began to express more reverence toward the past, looking to France's classical heritage and creating pictures of a sun-soaked Golden Age such as The Three Bathers II (1923). By the end of his life Picasso was more preoccupied by his own place in history and his place alongside the Masters, than he ever was with social outcasts. His fixation with one of modern art's seminal pictures, Edouard Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe, from 1863, ultimately led him to create some 140 drawings, 27 paintings, and 4 prints, all executed towards the end of his life. If in his early days he cast himself in the persona of figures from popular art, such as the harlequin (Seated Harlequin - 1901), by the end he saw himself in grander terms, as a musketeer (Woman and Musketeer - 1967).

Of course, just as Picasso wasn't always concerned with his own significance, so collectors weren't always convinced that buying Picasso conferred any particular status. That all changed in the 1980s, an age driven by financial titans that called for a muscular modern rebel like Picasso. Picasso might have died in 1973, but his legacy is strongly present in the art produced in the 80s; for example, one only has to stroll up New York's Sixth Avenue and see Jim Dine's rugged, monumental, headless bronze versions of Venus di Milo, installed on a corporate plaza. Those Venuses may not be renditions of the master himself, but they have Picasso's guts and muscle; they also have a touch of breezy comedy about them too, as they stand to greet the city traffic, and that's something that wasn't lacking in Picasso's late work. It reminds one that, even as the aging artist was worrying over his reputation, it is possible that he was aware of the futility of asserting a legacy, of trying to revive the Classical past, and of debating with dead artists. But given the prices paid for his work today, we may conclude that the lesson has not yet sunk in with his collectors.

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