Pablo Picasso’s ‘Woman With A Watch’ Sold For $139 Million

London:

One in every of Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces, “Girl with a Watch,” was bought at public sale Wednesday night time for $139.3 million by Sotheby’s in New York, the second-highest value ever achieved for the artist.

The 1932 portray depicts one of many Spanish artist’s companions and muses, the French painter Marie-Therese Walter, and had been valued at over $120 million earlier than happening the block, in keeping with Sotheby’s.

The portray is a part of Sotheby’s particular sale this week of the gathering of the rich New York patron of the humanities Emily Fisher Landau, who died this 12 months on the age of 102.

Julian Dawes, the home’s head of impressionist and trendy artwork, referred to as the Picasso canvas “a masterpiece by each measure.”

“Painted in 1932 — Picasso’s ‘annus mirabilis’ — it is stuffed with joyful, passionate abandon but on the identical time it’s completely thought-about and resolved,” he mentioned.

Walter was thought-about Picasso’s “golden muse”, and options in one other of his works going beneath the hammer on Thursday at Christie’s: “Femme endormie,” or “Sleeping Girl”, estimated to promote for $25-$35 million.

Walter met Picasso in Paris in 1927, when the Spaniard was nonetheless married to Russian-Ukrainian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, and when Walter was 17.

She additionally featured in “Femme assise pres d’une fenetre (Marie-Therese)”, which was bought in 2021 for $103.4 million by Christie’s public sale home.

In 2021, Sotheby’s additionally bought one other Picasso that includes Walter, for $103 million. The couple had a daughter collectively who died final 12 months.

Fifty years after his loss of life in 1973 aged 91, Picasso stays some of the influential artists of the fashionable world, and is commonly hailed as a dynamic and inventive genius.

However within the wake of the #MeToo motion towards sexual harassment and assault, his status has been tarnished by accusations that he exerted a violent maintain over the ladies who shared his life and impressed his artwork.

Sotheby’s is hoping to web round $400 million in gross sales for items from Landau’s assortment, which additionally consists of works by Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol.

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