Picasso’s painting “Woman with a Watch” sold at auction for $139.3 million

2023-11-09 01:58:29

The 1932 painting depicts one of the Spanish artist’s companions and muses, French painter Marie-Thérèse Walter, and had been estimated at more than $120 million, according to Sotheby’s.

One of the masterpieces of the Spanish master Pablo Picasso, Woman with a Watch, was sold at auction on Wednesday evening for 139.3 million dollars by Sotheby’s in New York, the second price ever reached for this dead artist 50 years ago.

This painting belonged to the wealthy New Yorker Emily Fisher Landau, who died this year at the age of 102, and whose collection of Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol is being offered for auction during two special evenings Wednesday and Thursday at the Sotheby’s headquarters in New York.

“A masterpiece in all its dimensions”

The painting hung in Emily Fisher Landau’s living room in Manhattan, Sotheby’s said. For this Landau collection alone, the auction house (owned by French and Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, boss of the Altice group which owns BFMTV, Editor’s note) is counting on more than 400 million dollars.

According to Julian Dawes, head of impressionist and modern art sales 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 the miracles, editor’s note).

Marie-Thérèse Walter was Picasso’s “golden muse”, his muse whom he met in 1927 in Paris when he was married to the Russian-Ukrainian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova.

This same Marie-Therese Walter had been painted by Picasso in “Sleeping Woman” (1934) and the painting will be auctioned on Thursday by Sotheby’s rival, Christie’s, which hopes for 25 to 35 million dollars. Already in 2021, Christie’s sold “Woman Seated near a Window (Marie-Thérèse)” for $103 million. Another Picasso from 1932 was sold for $106 million by Christie’s in 2010.