New York, Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece sold at auction for 139.3 million dollars

One of the masterpieces of Pablo Picasso, Woman with clock, sold at auction for $139.3 million at Sotheby’s in New York, the second-highest price ever achieved for the artist. The 1932 painting depicts one of the Spanish artist’s companions and muses, the French painter Marie-Therese Walterand was valued at over $120 million before being sold.

In the crowded room of Sotheby’s headquarters in Manhattan, it took just a few minutes of telephone bidding for this painting to go under the auctioneer’s hammer for exactly $139.36 million, including commissions. The painting, which a Sotheby’s executive, Brooke Lampley, compared to the Man Lisabelonged to wealthy New Yorker Emily Fisher Landau, who died this year at age 102, and whose collection of works by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko e Andy Warhol it is auctioned during two special evenings. The work hung in Ms. Landau’s living room in Manhattan, the company said. Only for this collection Landau, the auction house – owned by the French and Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi – has already sold for $406 million.
Among the financial performances of the evening, Flags of the American expressionist painter Jasper Johns, for 41 million dollars, and Securing the Last Letter (Boss) of the American painter and photographer Ed Ruscha, for 39.4 million. But it was obviously Picasso, who died in 1973, who attracted the crowd: his Woman with clock accounted for more than a third of sales.

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