Picasso's "Woman in the Watch" could sell for $120 million in New York

Europe 1 with AFP 12:03 pm, September 14, 2023

One of Pablo Picasso's masterpieces, "Woman on the Watch" (1932), depicting one of the Spanish artist's companions and muses, French painter Marie-Thérèse Walter, could sell for $120 million at auction in November, Sotheby's announced 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 that will be auctioned on November 8 and 9 for the fall season of art sales in the cultural and financial capital of the United States.

Sotheby's, owned by French, Moroccan and Israeli tycoon Patrick Drahi, said in a statement it expects "well over $400 million" in sales of this collection, including more than a quarter for "Woman on the 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.

The "golden muse"

Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977) was the "golden muse" of Picasso, 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, Maya Widmaier-Picasso (1935-2022), was "the subject of many of his most successful portraits," says Sotheby's.

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And the year 1932 was so important in Picasso's work that an entire exhibition was devoted to it in 2018 at the Tate Modern Museum in London. Thus, another portrait by Picasso depicting Walter, also painted in 1932, "Woman sitting by a window (Marie-Thérèse)", was sold in 2021 for $ 103.4 million at auction by the rival house Christie's in New York.

Charges of violent right-of-way

Fifty years after his death, the author of "Guernica" (1937) and "Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907) continues to fascinate: museums around the world, especially in France and Spain, are devoting fifty exhibitions to him in 2023.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) remains one of the most influential artists of modern art, readily described as a genius. But in the United States, in the wake of the #metoo movement, the figure of this workaholic at work is tarnished by the accusations of control, sometimes violent, that he could exert on the women who shared his life and inspired his work.