(New York) One of Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces, Woman with watch (1932), representing one of the Spanish artist’s companions and muses, the French painter Marie-Thérèse Walter, could sell for $120 million at auction in November, Sotheby’s announced on Wednesday.
This painting belongs to the wealthy New Yorker Emily Fisher Landau, who died this year at the age of 102. It also has a collection of works by Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol which will be offered for auction on November 8 and 9 for the fall season of art sales in the cultural and financial capital of UNITED STATES.
Sotheby’s, owned by French, Moroccan and Israeli magnate Patrick Drahi, indicated in a press release that it was counting on “well over $400 million” in sales from this collection, more than a quarter of which went to Woman with watch.
According to Julian Dawes, head of the impressionist and modern arts division at Sotheby’s, the painting by the Spanish master “is a masterpiece in all its dimensions”.
“Painted in 1932 – “annus mirabilis” for Picasso (year of miracles, Editor’s note) – it is both full of happiness and abandoned passion,” explains the expert.
Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977) was Picasso’s “golden muse”, his muse met in 1927 in Paris when the Spanish master was married to the Russian-Ukrainian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova.
The painter, who had a daughter with Picasso, Maya Widmaier-Picasso (1935-2022), was “the subject of many of his most successful portraits”, underlines Sotheby’s.
And the year 1932 was so important in Picasso’s work that an entire exhibition was dedicated to it in 2018 at the Tate Modern museum in London. Thus, another portrait by Picasso representing Walter, also painted in 1932, Woman sitting near a window (Marie-Thérèse)was sold in 2021 for $103.4 million at auction by competing house Christie’s in New York.
Fifty years after his death, the author of Guernica (1937) and Ladies of Avignon (1907) continues to fascinate: museums around the world, particularly in France and Spain, are devoting around fifty exhibitions to it in 2023.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) remains one of the most influential artists in modern art, readily described as a genius. But, in the United States, in the wake of the #metoo movement, the figure of this extremely wealthy workaholic is tarnished by accusations of control, sometimes violent, that he could exercise over the women who shared his life and inspired his work.