When it is auctioned this autumn, a Picasso masterpiece named ‘Femme à la montre’ is anticipated to fetch more than $120 million.
In November, the collection of Emily Fisher Landau will be put up for auction at Sotheby’s in New York, featuring the 1932 oil painting as its focal point. Picasso’s ‘golden muse’ and lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who appeared in several of his portraits, is portrayed in this work, which measures 51 x 38 inches (130 x 96.5 centimeters). The picture, which was the focus of a comprehensive exhibition held in 2018 by the Tate Modern in London and the Musée Picasso in Paris, dates from one of the busiest periods of the Spanish artist’s career, according to the auction house.
Picasso’s ‘Femme à la Montre’ is considered a masterpiece by any standards, as stated by Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s head of Impressionist & Modern Art for the Americas, in an announcement about the sale. Painted in 1932, Picasso’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’ brims with jubilant, passionate exuberance while being thoroughly thought out and resolved. The five-foot-tall canvas radiates with bright primary colors. When Picasso and Walter first met in Paris in 1927, she was 17 years old, and he was still married to his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, a Russian-Ukrainian ballet dancer. Some of his most coveted canvases, drawings, and sculptures were inspired by Walter.
As time passed, Picasso struggled more and more to keep his affection for Walter hidden from the public, a difficulty that was ultimately revealed in his first major retrospective, marking the end of Picasso and Walter’s union. In August 1932, not long after the retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris came to a close, the artist created ‘Femme à la montre.’ The sense of relief from keeping his affair a secret ‘seems to have spilled out onto this extraordinary canvas, in which he gives full painterly rein to newfound freedoms, drenching the painting in strong primary colors and beautiful forms while paying careful attention to every small detail, creating a composition that is both intensely complex and deeply harmonious,’ according to Sotheby’s.
Picasso passed away in 1973, and Walter in 1977. According to The Art Newspaper, the painting is one of roughly 120 from the collection of Fisher Landau, a prominent modern art collector who passed away earlier this year at the age of 102. The collection, which also includes pieces by Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, and Georgia O’Keeffe, is expected to fetch a total of more than $400 million. After receiving an insurance payment during an armed robbery of Fisher Landau’s jewelry at her New York residence in 1969, she began taking collecting seriously. She described the incident in an interview for an exhibition catalog, which was cited in Sotheby’s statement: ‘Even if Lloyds of London paid up, there was no way to replace that collection. It was incredibly lovely. I was devastated when they quickly captured it. But I made the decision that I no longer desired the jewelry. I now have the initial funding for a collection.’
Picasso’s most intriguing portrait of Walter, in which she is depicted as a tentacled sea creature, sold at Sotheby’s in New York last year for $67.5 million. Picasso’s images of Walter are in high demand; his other paintings from 1932, ‘Femme assise près d’une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse),’ sold for $103.41 million in 2021, and ‘Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust’ fetched $106.5 million in 2010. Picasso’s ‘Les Femmes d’Alger (Version “O”)’ sold at Christie’s in New York in May 2015 for $179.4 million, setting the record for the most money ever spent at an auction for a piece of art.
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