BLOOMINGTON - Three sketches by Pablo Picasso on a book dust jacket sold for $36,000 Friday at Bloomington Auction Gallery's annual after-Thanksgiving estate auction.

Initial sale estimates ranged from $40,000 to $100,000, but auction manager Jason Penny said before the sale that the final price tag would be hard to gauge.

"They aren't as easy to market as one of his major artworks," Penny said. "It takes a true collector to buy a strike-of-the-moment work, a true lover of Picasso."

The freehand drawings in black ink portray Picasso's wife, Olga; a flute player and his mistress; and a nude male. They were on two pieces of yellowed and slightly tattered paper measuring 14.25 by 10.75 inches, the fragments of a dust cover for "Picasso and The Human Comedy," a 1954 French book featuring his art.

The identities of the buyer and seller were not disclosed Friday night.

The drawings were on display for about 1½ hours before the auction, along with about 380 other lots for sale, but hardly anyone stopped to glance in the glass case. Other items, including furniture, porcelain, clocks, crocks, jewelry, toys and other artwork, drew far more attention.

Penny also wasn't surprised by that, noting about half of his customers were resellers looking for inventory and many others were locals looking for bargains. He predicted online and phone bidders would dominate the Picasso sale.

He was right. The audience of about 270 people watched passively as bidders elsewhere drove upward in $1,000 increments from the $10,000 opening bid.

Penny joked to the crowd, "How come nobody here's bidding?"

In less than two minutes, the sketches were sold. With the auction premium figured in, the final price could reach $40,500, plus sales tax.

rmiller@pantagraph.com