(New York) One of Spanish master Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces, Woman with a Watch, was sold at auction Wednesday evening for $139 million by Sotheby’s in New York, the second price ever achieved for the artist died 50 years ago.
In the packed room at Sotheby’s headquarters in Manhattan, it took only a few minutes of telephone bidding for this painting to go under the auctioneer’s hammer to applause for exactly $139.36 million, including fees. .
The 1932 painting, which Sotheby’s executive Brooke Lampley compared to “Picasso’s ‘Mona Lisa,'” depicts one of the Spanish artist’s companions, the French painter Marie-Thérèse Walter, and had been estimated at over $120 million.
The painting belonged to the wealthy New Yorker Emily Fisher Landau, who died this year at age 102, and whose collection of works by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol is being offered for auction during two special evenings Wednesday and Thursday at Sotheby’s in New York.
The painting hung in Ms. Landau’s living room in Manhattan, the company said.
For this Landau collection alone, the auction house – owned by French and Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi – has already sold for $406 million.
Among the financial performances of the evening, Flags by the American expressionist painter Jasper Johns, 93, for $41 million, and Securing the Last Letter (Boss) by the American painter and photographer Ed Ruscha, aged 85, for $39.4 million.
But it was Picasso, who died in 1973, who drew the crowds on Wednesday evening, his “Woman with a Watch” accounting for more than a third of the sales.
Marie-Thérèse Walter was the “golden muse” of the Spanish master, his muse met in 1927 in Paris while he was married to the Russian-Ukrainian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova.
The sale of “Woman with a Watch” is the second most expensive for Picasso’s works, with the artist now having at least six paintings valued above $100 million.
He had painted this same Marie-Therese Walter in Sleeping Woman (1934) which will be auctioned on Thursday by Sotheby’s competitor, Christie’s, which is hoping for $25 to $35 million. Already in 2021, Christie’s sold Woman Seated Near a Window (Marie-Thérèse) for $103 million.
Another Picasso (Nude with sculptor’s plate) from 1932 was sold in 2010 for some $106 million by Christie’s, owned by the Artémis holding of French billionaire François Pinault.
The all-time record for Picasso is Women of Algiers (“O” Version) at $179.4 million: this oil on canvas painted in 1955 is the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction.
At the time of its sale, on May 11, 2015 also at Christie’s in New York, it was even the absolute record for an art auction, surpassed in 2017 by the “Salvator Mundi”, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, for 450 millions of dollars.
In the international context of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and inflation, the art market continues to show excellent health: the fall sales season in New York for the major auction houses Sotheby’s , Christie’s and the smaller Phillips, Nov. 7-15, are expected to raise billions of dollars.
