A painting by the famous cubist Pablo Picasso of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter sold for $121 million at Sotheby's much-anticipated Emily Fisher Landau auction.
Sotheby's won the honor of managing the estate of Landau, a longtime board member of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which also had a private museum, earlier this year. With an estimate of US$120 million, “Femme à la montre”, by Picasso, was the cornerstone of the highly successful auction.
Bidding started at $95 million and quickly reached $115 million, reaching the $120 million estimate after a two-minute standoff between telephone bidders. Ultimately, Brooke Lampley – the house's head of global fine art bidding on behalf of the client – won with a bid of US$139,363,500, after taxes and fees, a rather anticlimactic result that received polite, if muted, applause from the public.
The painting depicts Walter, known as the “golden muse” of Picasso, and was created shortly after the secrecy surrounding the case ended. The pair met in 1927, outside the Galeries Lafayette, in Paris, when Walter was just 17 years old and Picasso, then 45, was still married to Ukrainian dancer Olga Khokhlova, mother of his son Paulo.
Before the sale, Sotheby's announced the work as one of the artist's most significant to be auctioned since 2010, although two other paintings from the same year depicting Walter have been sold in recent years. His ”Femme nue couchée” sold for US$67.5 million at Sotheby's New York in 2022, while “Femme assise près d'une fenêtre” sold for US$103.4 million at Christie's New York in 2021.
Scholars consider 1932 a highly creative year for Picasso and his numerous paintings of Walter from this period even generated an exhibition in 2017 at Tate Modern.
Source: Artnet News