(New York) One of Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces, Woman with a Watch (1932), depicting one of the Spanish artist’s companions and muses, French painter Marie-Thérèse Walter, could sell $120 million at auction in November, Sotheby’s announced Wednesday.
This painting 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.
Sotheby’s, owned by French, Moroccan and Israeli magnate Patrick Drahi, indicated in a press release that it expected “well over $400 million” in sales from this collection, more than a quarter of which was for Femme à la montre.
According to Julian Dawes, head of the impressionist and modern arts division at Sotheby’s, the painting by the Spanish master “is a masterpiece in all its dimensions”.
“Painted in 1932 – “annus mirabilis” for Picasso (year of miracles, Editor’s note) – it is full of both happiness and abandoned passion,” explains the expert.
Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977) was Picasso’s “golden muse”, his muse whom he met in 1927 in Paris when the Spanish master was married to the Russian-Ukrainian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova.
The painter, who had a daughter with Picasso, Maya Widmaier-Picasso (1935-2022), was “the subject of many of his most successful portraits”, underlines Sotheby’s.
And the year 1932 was so important in Picasso’s work that an entire exhibition was dedicated to it in 2018 at the Tate Modern museum in London. Thus, another portrait by Picasso representing Walter, also painted in 1932, Woman Seated Near a Window (Marie-Thérèse), was sold in 2021 for $103.4 million at auction by the competing house Christie’s in New York .
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.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) remains one of the most influential artists in modern art, readily described as a genius. But, in the United States, in the wake of the movement
