One of Spanish Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces, “The Woman with a Clock”, was sold on Wednesday night (8) for US$ 139.3 million (R$ 680 million) at an auction at Sotheby’s in New York , the second highest price for a work by the artist who died 50 years ago.
The 1932 painting depicts one of Picasso’s companions and muses, the French painter Marie-Thérèse Walter, and had been estimated at more than $120 million (R$586 million), according to the auction house.
The painting belonged to New York collector Emily Fisher Landau, who passed away in March this year at the age of 102, and whose collection of works by Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol will be auctioned on two special nights, today and tomorrow at Sotheby’s headquarters in Manhattan.
The auction house, owned by French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, expects to sell Landau’s collection for more than $400 million (R$1.95 billion).
Marie-Thérèse Walter was Picasso’s “golden muse”, whom he met in 1927 in Paris, when he was married to the Russian-Ukrainian ballerina Olga Koklova.
This Wednesday’s sale was the second most expensive in the history of Picasso (1881-1973), an artist who has at least six paintings worth more than 100 million dollars (R$488 million).
Its historic record is “The Women of Algiers (Version O)”, sold for 179.4 million dollars in 2015 (R$ 876 million, at current prices). This oil on canvas painted in 1955 is the most expensive modern work ever sold at auction.
At that time, it was the most expensive work auctioned in history, until it was surpassed in November 2017 by “Salvator Mundi”, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold for 450 million dollars (about R$ 2.2 billion, at the price current), the current world record on the art market.