In 1932, Picasso portrayed his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. The painting has now been auctioned in New York for around 130 million euros. It comes from one of the world’s most important collections of modern art.
A work by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso from the famous collection of Emily Fisher Landau, who died in March, has been sold at auction for almost 140 million dollars (around 130 million euros). This makes it the second most expensive work by Picasso ever sold at auction, said the auction house Sotheby’s in New York. In 2015, “Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” fetched around $179 million at Christie’s in New York.
The 1932 Picasso painting “Femme à la montre” (“Woman with a Wristwatch”) is a portrait of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. The collector Landau bought it in 1968 and then had it hanging above the fireplace in her New York apartment for many years, explained Sotheby’s. Who bought it was not disclosed.
The auction house’s head of Impressionist and Modern Art, Julian Dawes, described the Picasso painting as “a masterpiece by all the rules of art.” It is “full of joyful, passionate devotion, but at the same time extremely thoughtful and determined.”
Work comes from a famous modern art collection
At the end of the 1960s, Landau received a large insurance sum after jewelry was stolen and began buying art. Over the years she built up one of the world’s most important collections of modern art, with works by, among others, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Robert Mapplethorpe. For a time, Landau also ran a museum in the New York borough of Queens. She died in March at the age of 102.
In addition to the Picasso, around 120 works are expected to go under the hammer at the two-day Sotheby’s auction – before the traditional autumn auction next week.