Picasso’s daughter Maya settles battle over Bust of a Woman

The dispute has ended with the sculpture going to Leon Black instead of Quatar’s royal family.

Picasso’s Bust of a Woman (Marie-Therese) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

One of the year’s most closely followed art disputes ended this week when several parties vying for Picasso’s 1931 plaster sculpture Bust of a Woman (Marie-Therese) said they had reached a settlement that made New York financier Leon Black the legal victor.

The artwork’s seller — Picasso’s daughter Maya Widmaier-Picasso — agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to art agents for a competing buyer, the Qatari royal family, and thereby quell allegations she sold the same work twice.

Widmaier-Picasso, the artist’s daughter with his French mistress Marie-Therese Walter, issued a joint statement with her daughter Diana as well as Black and art agencies Pelham Europe and Seydoux & Associates Fine Art to say she was “pleased” to have resolved the dispute.

An international custody battle broke out in January after Widmaier-Picasso sold Bust of a Woman (Marie-Therese) to Black through New York’s Gagosian Gallery for about $US106 million, a record sum for any Picasso sculpture.

Pelham and Seydoux contested the deal, saying they had already agreed to pay about $US42m for the same piece on behalf of the Qataris two years earlier. Pelham said in US federal court documents that it had made two of three scheduled payments when Widmaier-Picasso suddenly backed out of the deal and returned the money.

Widmaier-Picasso said earlier that her daughter had convinced her she could get a higher price if she sold the piece to Gagosian instead.

She said her daughter “cannot be faulted for reminding her mother of the sculpture’s true value”.

Pelham’s lawyer Jo Laird confirmed on Wednesday that Widmaier-Picasso had paid Pelham and Seydoux an amount that “made them very happy”. Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for Gagosian, says the gallery will aim to deliver the sculpture to Black as soon as possible and calls the settlement a “complete vindication of the gallery’s position”.

The chalky bust, whose nose is meant to evoke a phallus, represents an iconic example of Picasso’s erotic depictions of his young mistress at the time. It was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of Picasso sculpture, which closed in February, and has long been deemed a potential trophy.

Black, chairman of Apollo Global Management, is also MoMA’s co-chairman and owns widely known artworks such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream.