Picasso Masterpiece Could Fetch More Than $120 Million At Auction

Come November, the storied art collection of Emily Fisher Landau will go up for auction at Sotheby’s two-day event. The headline, of course, is the philanthropist’s Pablo Picasso portrait, Femme à la Montre.

Expected to fetch an astonishing US$120 million or more, the 1932 artwork portrays the famed artist’s lover and “golden muse,” Marie-Thérèse Walter—the same woman featured in another piece that went on sale two years prior.

Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s head of impressionist and modern art for the Americas, described the painting as “full of joyful, passionate abandon, yet at the same time, it is utterly considered and resolved.”

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According to the auction house, the late Landau had acquired the work on the spot, with the masterpiece remaining “the keystone of her collection for more than five decades.”

Other works that will be auctioned off alongside the Picasso include Securing the Last Letter (Boss) by Ed Ruscha, an untitled painting by Mark Rothko, and a silkscreen work on canvas by Andy Warhol. 

[via CNN and ARTnews, cover image via Sotheby’s]