Picasso’s most expensive painting to sell at auction was Les Femmes d’Alger (Women of Algiers), which fetched $179.3m at Christie’s in 2015.
Pablo Picasso’s 1932 masterpiece “Femme à la montre” (“Woman with a Watch”) fetched over $139 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York, claiming the title of the highest-priced piece of art sold at auction this year worldwide. The 1932 painting depicts one of the Spanish artist’s companions and muses, the French painter Marie-Therese Walter, and had been valued at over $120 million before going on the block, according to Sotheby’s.
It was previously owned by the late art collector Emily Fisher Landau, who bought it in 1968, and has been purchased by an anonymous buyer. It was auctioned off as a part of a collection belonging to the late philanthropist Emily Fisher Landau, which was estimated to be worth around $400 million.
The painting is one of about 120 from the collection of Fisher Landau, a world renowned contemporary art collector who died earlier this year aged 102, according to The Art Newspaper.
About the painting and the woman in it
Femme a la Montre is a portrait of Walter seated in a throne-like chair against a blue background. Known as Picasso’s “golden muse”, Walter was 17 when she met the 45-year-old Picasso in Paris, and the pair later entered into a secret relationship while he was still married to Olga Khokhlova, a Ukrainian ballerina.
Walter became the subject for many of Picasso’s paintings, including the 1932 work Femme Nue Couchee (Nude Reclining Woman), which sold for $67.5m at auction in 2022.
Picasso’s most expensive painting to sell at auction was Les Femmes d’Alger (Women of Algiers), which fetched $179.3m at Christie’s in 2015.
Born in Malaga in 1881 and growing up in Barcelona, Picasso moved to Paris in 1904 and became one of the most important artists of the 20th century.
Fifty years after his death in 1973 aged 91, Picasso remains one of the most influential artists of the modern world, and is often hailed as a dynamic and creative genius.
But in the wake of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault, his reputation has been tarnished by accusations that he exerted a violent hold over the women who shared his life and inspired his art.