Picasso's 'Golden Muse' Portrait Sold for 180 Billion Won... Second Highest Price Recorded

Sotheby's "Exposed Affair to Wife and World with This Work"
Highest Price Among This Year's Auctioned Artworks

Spanish painter Pablo Picasso's 1932 work "Femme ? la montre (Woman with a Watch)" was sold for $139.3 million (approximately 182 billion KRW), Bloomberg reported on the 8th (local time). It is the second highest price ever recorded for a Picasso piece.

Pablo Picasso's 1932 work 'Woman with a Clock'
[Image source=AFP Yonhap News]

According to reports, "Femme ? la montre," sold at a Sotheby's auction in New York that day, is a portrait of Marie-Th?r?se Walter, Picasso's lover and French model. Walter was known as Picasso's "Golden Muse."

Picasso met Walter when he was 45 and she was 17, and while married to Olga Khokhlova, a Ukrainian ballerina, he had a secret affair with Walter. Sotheby's introduced that Picasso used this painting to publicly reveal his infidelity to his wife and the world ahead of the auction.

This work became the highest-priced artwork sold in the global auction market this year. It was part of the collection of real estate developer Emily Fisher Landau, who passed away earlier this year, and before this auction, it had been valued at $120 million.

Bloomberg predicted that no artwork in this fall auction season would surpass the winning bid of "Femme ? la montre," while The New York Times (NYT) highlighted the high price achieved despite the art market being in a slump.

Simon Shaw, Vice Chairman of Sotheby's Global Art Division, told The Guardian, "When you think of Picasso, you think of passion, but his passion for watches is less well known," adding, "He was an incredibly stylish person and an excellent watch connoisseur. Even photos of him wearing a watch are highly regarded by watch collectors."

With this auction result, "Femme ? la montre" became the second highest-priced Picasso work ever sold. The highest-priced Picasso piece is "Les Femmes d'Alger (Women of Algiers)," which sold for $179.3 million in 2015.

Meanwhile, starting with the Landau collection, the fall auction season of the world's top three auction houses?Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips?is expected to feature artworks worth approximately $2.5 billion. The Guardian forecasted that sales from the Landau collection alone could reach ?500 million (about 804 billion KRW). On the 9th, Christie's auction will include Claude Monet's "Water Lilies Pond," as well as works by Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko from the Landau collection, which are also expected to find new owners.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.