One can find comfort in a few exhibitions that have recently been staged at commercial spaces in New York. Through June 6, Gagosian Gallery’s West 21st Street branch is presenting an exhilarating display of Picasso’s output from 1963 until his death 10 years later, at the age of 91. Nearly one hundred works show the master still innovating with a vigor most artists decades younger would have a hard time matching. The pieces come from a dizzying array of sources: international galleries and museums, disparate family members and countless anonymous private collectors, along with the increasingly not-so-private (more on that later) übercollectors Steven and Alexandra Cohen. Even with John Richardson, the Picasso biographer and family friend, curating the show and presumably greasing the wheels, coordinating the various loans must have required formidable clout and financial backing.

Two earlier tour-de-force displays in commercial venues were the Acquavella Galleries’ late-2008 presentation of Picasso’s Marie Thérèse portraits and Wildenstein’s Monet show from the previous year. These, too, exemplify a type of exhibition that Larry Gagosian is purported to particularly adore — and has made a happy habit of staging, from his fall 2002 historical survey of works from L.A.’s pioneering Ferus Gallery to October 2007’s sprawling "Pop Art Is ..." in London to this spring’s eye-opening Piero Manzoni retrospective, which closed at the gallery’s West 24th Street space just days before the hoary Picasso took up residence three blocks south.

Perhaps most remarkable about these endeavors is that they primarily comprise pieces not being offered for sale. So what, cynically speaking, is in it for Gagosian and his ilk? Certainly, burnishing artists’ reputations lays the groundwork for future transactions with collectors selling or seeking their works. And perhaps by providing a public service (without charging $20 admission) the dealers hope to gain museumlike credibility, along with the public’s goodwill.

Such aspirations could be the impetus behind another show I caught early last month, at Sotheby’s New York: "Women," a loan exhibition from the collection of Steven and Alexandra Cohen. Notoriously private, the Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge-fund billionaire and his wife have amassed one of the world’s best collections of 20th-century art. At Sotheby’s, Edvard Munch’s Madonna, 1895-97, mingled with other nudes by Modigliani, Freud, Matisse (cast in bronze) and, again, Picasso, as well as with celebrities like Warhol’s Marilyn and such market-milestone markers as Marlene Dumas’s The Visitor, 1995, which was bought at auction in 2008 for $6.3 million, making it the most expensive work by a living female artist, and de Kooning’s Woman III, 1952-53, for which the Cohens reportedly paid David Geffen $137.5 million in 2006.

At a time when the art world hungers for some good news, it’s clear why Sotheby’s would hand over prime real estate to masterpieces it’s not selling now or, ostensibly, any time soon. But why have the Cohens seemingly decided to "go public" after a decade of collecting largely under the radar? It may have something to do with Steve Cohen’s ownership of a large chunk of Sotheby’s stock. It may owe to his desire to prop up the value of his art when other assets could be declining. Or it may simply be an act of largesse, sharing the wealth, so to speak, when there seems to be a lot less of it to go around.

"From the Editor" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2009 Table of Contents.