Picasso's 'Woman with a Watch' Painting Sold at Auction for $139 Million

Europe 1 with AFP / Credits: ANGELA WEISS / AFP 17:08 p.m., November 09, 2023

One of Spanish master Pablo Picasso's masterpieces, "Woman with a Watch," was auctioned Wednesday night for $139 million by Sotheby's in New York, the second-highest price ever for the artist who died 50 years ago. In the packed room of Sotheby's headquarters in Manhattan, it took only a few minutes of bidding on the phone for this painting to be sold to applause for exactly $139.36 million, including fees, under the auctioneer's hammer.

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"Picasso's Mona Lisa"

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 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 up for auction on two special evenings Wednesday and Thursday at Sotheby's in New York.

The painting hung in Landau's living room in Manhattan, the company said. For this Landau collection alone, the auction house, owned by French and Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, has already sold for $406 million.

One-third of the amount of sales

Among the financial performances of the evening were "Flags" by 93-year-old American expressionist painter Jasper Johns for $41 million, and "Securing the Last Letter (Boss)" by 85-year-old American painter and photographer Ed Ruscha for $39.4 million.

But it was Picasso, who died in 1973, who drew the crowd Wednesday night, with his "Woman with a Watch" accounting for more than a third of the sales amount. Marie-Thérèse Walter was the "golden muse" of the Spanish master, his muse whom he met in 1927 in Paris when he was married to the Russian-Ukrainian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova.

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Second most expensive sale for a Picasso

The sale of "Woman with a Watch" is the second most expensive for Picasso's works, with the artist now having at least six paintings valued above $100 million. He had painted this same Marie-Thérèse Walter as "Sleeping Woman" (1934) which will be auctioned on Thursday by Sotheby's competitor Christie's, which is hoping for $25 million to $35 million. Already in 2021, Christie's sold "Woman Seated by a Window (Marie-Thérèse)" for $103 million.

Another Picasso "Nude with a Sculptor's Tray" from 1932 was sold in 2010 for some $106 million by Christie's, owned by French billionaire François Pinault's Artémis holding company. The all-time record for Picasso is "The Women of Algiers (Version "O")" 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, also on May 11, 2015 at Christie's in New York, it was even the absolute record for an art auction, surpassed in 2017 by the "Salvator Mundi", attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, for $450 million.