One of Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces, Woman with a Watch, was sold at auction Wednesday night for $139.3 million by Sotheby’s in New York, the second-highest price ever achieved for the artist.<\/p>\n
In a jam-packed room at the venerable auction house, it only took a few minutes of telephone bidding for the 1932 painting depicting one of the Spanish artist’s companions and muses, the French painter Marie-Therese Walter, to be sold.<\/p>\n
Femme a la montre had been valued at over $120 million before going on the block, according to Sotheby’s.<\/p>\n
It was part of the house’s special sale this week of the collection of New York arts patron Emily Fisher Landau, who died this year at age 102.<\/p>\n
Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s head of impressionist and modern art, called the Picasso canvas — which hung in Landau’s living room — “a masterpiece by every measure.”<\/p>\n
“Painted in 1932 — Picasso’s ‘annus mirabilis’ — it is full of joyful, passionate abandon yet at the same time it is utterly considered and resolved,” he said.<\/p>\n
Walter was regarded as Picasso’s “golden muse,” and features in another of his works going under the hammer on Thursday at Christie’s: Femme endormie, or Sleeping Woman, estimated to sell for $25 million-$35 million.<\/p>\n
She also featured in Femme assise pres d’une fenetre (Marie-Therese), or Woman Sitting Near a Window, which was sold in 2021 for $103.4 million.<\/p>\n
Walter met Picasso in Paris in 1927, when she was just 17 and the Spanish artist was still married to Russian-Ukrainian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova. The couple had a daughter, who died last year.<\/p>\n
Another Picasso from 1932 was sold for $106 million in 2010.<\/p>\n
The record sale for one of his works was of The Women of Algiers (Version O), a 1955 oil painting which sold for $179.4 million.<\/p>\n
When it went under the hammer at Christie’s New York in 2015, it was also the record for any work of art sold at auction.<\/p>\n
It was dethroned in November 2017 by the sale of Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which went for $450 million and holds the record to this day.<\/p>\n
Hot market<\/p>\n
Fifty years after his death in 1973 at age 91, Picasso remains one of the most influential artists of the modern world, often hailed as a dynamic and creative genius.<\/p>\n
But following the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault, his reputation has been tarnished by accusations he exerted a violent hold over the women who shared his life and inspired his art.<\/p>\n
Sotheby’s has already netted $406 million in sales from Landau’s collection, which also includes works by Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol.<\/p>\n
Flags by the 93-year-old Johns sold for $41 million, while Securing the Last Letter (Boss) by painter and photographer Ed Ruscha sold for $39.4 million.<\/p>\n
Auction houses are enjoying a healthy art and luxury goods market, driven by China and showing no signs of a slowdown, said Kelsey Reed Leonard, head of contemporary art sales at Sotheby’s.<\/p>\n
Against a backdrop of wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as worldwide inflation, the two titans of the sector — Sotheby’s and Christie’s — will be moving a host of big-ticket lots in the autumn sales, though they may still have a hard time topping last year, when total sales hit a record $16 billion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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