Picasso’s labour of love fetches $220 million at auction

Femme a la Montre, Picasso’s 1932 portrait of his secret lover and muse became the artist’s second most expensive work sold at auction.

Sotheby's "The Emily Fisher Landau Collection: An Era Defined’ auction for Pablo Picasso's Femme a la Montre, at Sotheby's in New York City on November 8, 2023. Picture: AFP

A painting with which Pablo Picasso announced to the world and his wife that he was in love with another woman has sold for $220 million.

Femme a la Montre is a 1932 portrait of Marie-Therese Walter, the young woman who had become Picasso’s muse and secret mistress.

#AuctionUpdate: Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Femme à la montre (1932) realizes $139.4m—the second highest ever achieved for the artist at auction, and the most valuable work sold at auction this year. #TheFisherLandauLegacypic.twitter.com/xPBhvA1Z86

— Sotheby's (@Sothebys) November 8, 2023

He first set eyes on her in 1927, when she was 17 and standing outside a famous Parisian department store. He said: “I am Picasso!” she recalled years later. “You and I are going to do great things together!”

At first, however, these things had to be done surreptitiously because the artist was married to a Russian-Ukrainian ballerina named Olga Khokhlova.

She is said to have learnt how his affections had turned in another direction at his 1932 exhibition: a retrospective of his work that also included new, large canvases depicting Walter, that drew enormous crowds. Femme a la Montre was painted two months later and offered confirmation, on a grand scale, of the new object of his adoration.

Marie-Therese Walter, artist Pablo Picasso's under-age lover, in an undated photo. Picture: 'The Life of Picasso, Volume III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932

Pablo Picasso posing in his Paris studio. Picture: Getty

“It was the ultimate public humiliation,” Brooke Lampley, head of global fine art at Sotheby’s, said when the sale was announced. Lampley described it as Picasso’s version of the Mona Lisa: painted during a year when the artist was looking back at his career and striving both to measure and reshape his place in art history.

On Wednesday night at Sotheby’s in New York it became the second most expensive work by the artist to be sold at auction. The buyer remained anonymous.

The seller was Candia Fisher, whose father, Martin, bought the painting for her mother in 1968 and placed it above their mantlepiece, marvelling at the fact that they owned a Picasso. Her father was colour-blind, but the colours in the portrait were so bright that “he could actually see it”, she told The Times this year.

Sotheby's employees take phone bids during the auction. Picture: AFP

Her mother was starting to collect art at the time. The following year, a crew of burglars dressed as airconditioning repairmen broke into their home in Manhattan, tied up the cook and the house keeper and stole her mother’s jewellery collection. It was insured for $1.6 million. “My father let her keep the insurance money,” Fisher said, and instead of buying new jewels, she began buying art.

When she died this year at the age of 102, her collection was large enough to fill several museums. Four hundred works were pledged to museums, but several dozen pieces went to auction on Wednesday.

The record sale for one of Picasso’s works was The Women of Algiers (Version O), a 1955 oil painting that sold for $280.7 million.

Besides the Picasso, the Jasper Johns 1968 painting Flags, showing two American flags, sold for $64 million and an Ed Ruscha painting called Securing the Last Letter (Boss) from 1964, in which the last “S” of boss is secured with a clamp, sold for $61 million.

The Times