(Dubai) One of Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces, Woman with a Watch, painted in 1932, was exhibited Monday in Dubai at the start of a tour that will also take it to Hong Kong, then to New York where it will be auctioned in November.

The prestigious auction house Sotheby’s indicated in mid-September that the painting, representing one of the companions and muses of the Spanish artist, the French painter Marie-Thérèse Walter, could sell for $120 million at auction on 8 and November 9.

“The public will have the privilege of appreciating this masterpiece before its world tour,” Sheikh Salem bin Khaled Al-Qassimi, the Minister of Culture of the United Arab Emirates, said in a statement on the occasion, the Gulf State of which Dubai is a part.

The work is visible in the Sotheby’s showroom, owned by French, Moroccan and Israeli tycoon Patrick Drahi, at the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), the emirate’s financial district.

According to Julian Dawes, head of the impressionist and modern art division at Sotheby’s, Picasso attracts potential buyers from all over the world.

“In the past we have seen offers from literally every continent, every major city,” he told AFP at the inauguration ceremony in Dubai.

“Between 2021 and 2022, we have seen an increase of more than 100% in the number of bidders and buyers from the Middle East,” he said.

Woman with a Watch belongs to the wealthy New Yorker Emily Fisher Landau, who died this year at the age of 102. It also has a collection of works by Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol which will be offered for auction on November 8 and 9 for the fall season of art sales in the cultural and financial capital of UNITED STATES.

Fifty years after his death, the author of Guernica (1937) and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) continues to fascinate: museums around the world, particularly in France and Spain, are devoting around fifty exhibitions to him in 2023.