Picasso’s ‘Woman with a Watch’ fetches $139m at NY auction

NEW YORK: One of Pablo Picasso´s masterpieces, “Woman with a Watch,” was sold at auction late on Wednesday night for $139.3 million by Sotheby´s in New York, the second-highest price ever achieved for the artist.

In a jam-packed room at the venerable auction house, it only took a few minutes of telephone bidding for the 1932 painting depicting one of the Spanish artist´s companions and muses, the French painter Marie-Therese Walter, to be sold.

“Femme a la montre” had been valued at over $120 million before going on the block, according to Sotheby´s. It was part of the house´s special sale this week of the collection of New York arts patron Emily Fisher Landau, who died this year at age 102.

Julian Dawes, Sotheby´s head of impressionist and modern art, called the Picasso canvas -- which hung in Landau´s living room -- “a masterpiece by every measure.” “Painted in 1932 -- Picasso´s ´annus mirabilis´ -- it is full of joyful, passionate abandon yet at the same time it is utterly considered and resolved,” he said.