Pablo Picasso painting breaks records with $139m sale
A 1932 painting by Pablo Picasso, Femme à la montre, sold this week at Sotheby’s New York auction for $139million.
The sale makes it not only the most valuable artwork sold this year but also the second most expensive Picasso piece ever to appear at auction.
Femme à la montre is beaten only by the 2015 sale of Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’), which sold for $179.3m. The painting was part of what is estimated to be a near $400m sale from the collection of Emily Fisher Landau.
The late Landau, a philanthropist and art collector, had 120 works from her personal collection shown across two days at auction, including the Picasso piece as well as others by prolific artists like Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keefe.
Femme à la montre, meaning ‘Woman with a Watch’, was Picasso’s portrait of his lover and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter. The Spanish artist met her when he was 45 and she was 17, and went on to tell her: “I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together.”
The painting gave Picasso a “sense of release,” according to Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s head of Impressionist & Modern Art for the Americas. It meant that the artist had “full painterly rein to new-found freedoms, drenching the painting in strong primary colors and beautiful forms, while at the same time paying careful attention to every small detail, creating a composition that is both intensely complex and deeply harmonious.”
Picasso was married at the time to Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova at the time, and his paintings of his wife featured the same watch motif as seen in the painting of Walter.
