It only took a few minutes of telephone bidding for the painting to fly away to the applause of the public and the auctioneer’s hammer. One of Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces, Woman with a Watch, was sold at auction on the evening of Wednesday November 8 for $139 million (more than €129 million) by Sotheby’s in New York.
In the crowded room at Sotheby’s headquarters in Manhattan, the work was sold for exactly $139.36 million, including fees. This is the second price ever achieved for a painting by the Spanish artist, who died fifty years ago.
The 1932 painting, which Sotheby’s executive Brooke Lampley compared to “Picasso’s Mona Lisa,” depicts one of the Spanish artist’s companions, French painter Marie-Thérèse Walter, and had been estimated at more than $120 million.
The painting belonged to the wealthy New Yorker Emily Fisher Landau, who died this year at the age of 102, and whose collection of works by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol is being offered for auction during two special evenings Wednesday and Thursday at Sotheby’s in New York. The painting hung in Ms. Landau’s living room in Manhattan, the company said.
For this Landau collection alone, the auction house – owned by Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi – has already sold $406 million worth of works.
Marie-Thérèse Walter, the “golden muse”
Other financial performances of the evening included Flags by the American expressionist painter Jasper Johns, 93, which fetched $41 million, and Securing the Last Letter (Boss) by the American painter and photographer Ed Ruscha, aged 85. , for $39.4 million.
But it was Picasso, who died in 1973, who attracted the crowd on Wednesday evening, his Woman with a Watch representing more than a third of the total sales. The sale of “Woman with a Watch” is the second most expensive for a Picasso work, with the artist now having at least six paintings valued above $100 million.
Marie-Thérèse Walter was the “golden muse” of the Spanish master. He met her in 1927 in Paris when he was married to the Russian-Ukrainian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova. He had painted this same Marie-Therese Walter in Sleeping Woman (1934) which will be auctioned on Thursday by Sotheby’s competitor, Christie’s, which is hoping for $25 to $35 million. Already in 2021, Christie’s sold Woman Seated Near a Window (Marie-Thérèse) for $103 million.
“The Women of Algiers (Version “O”)”, absolute record
Another Picasso (Nude with sculptor’s plate) from 1932 was sold in 2010 for some $106 million by Christie’s, owned by the Artémis holding of French billionaire François Pinault.
The all-time record for Picasso is Women of Algiers (“O” Version) at $179.4 million: this oil on canvas painted in 1955 is the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction.
At the time of its sale, on May 11, 2015, also at Christie’s in New York, it was even the absolute record for an art auction, surpassed in 2017 by the Salvator Mundi, a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, for $450 million.
In the international context of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and inflation, the art market continues to show excellent health: the fall sales season in New York for the major auction houses Sotheby’s , Christie’s and the smaller Phillips, November 7-15, are expected to raise billions of dollars.
