Picasso painting sells for $103 million in New York

A Pablo Picasso painting has sold for a staggering $103.4 million after juts 19 minutes of bidding at a New York auction house. Christie’s said the painting was sold for $90 million, which rose to $103.4 million when fees and commissions were added. The value was nearly twice what it estimated it would be sold at, which was $55 million.

This is the fifth Picasso painting to sell for above $100 million. His most expensive painting yet, “Women of Algiers”, sold for $179.4 million in 2015.

Christie’s 20^th and 21^st Century evening sales have in total realised $691,585,500 over two nights with bidders from across the world.

“While masterpieces could be found at every level, works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh achieved the top results for the evening,” Christie’s said in a post.

In its description on the artwork, which in French was titled “Femme assise près d'une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse)”, Christie’s noted that the year it was made, 1932, witnessed the “extraordinary outpouring of large-scale, color-filled, rhapsodic depictions of Pablo Picasso’s clandestine, golden-haired lover and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter.”

“Having deified her statuesque form and classical profile in the great series of plaster busts the prior year, Picasso allowed the influence of his young mistress and the romantic and erotic bliss in which he found himself to fill his painting,” it said.

“No more the languorously reclining nude lost in a private reverie, in the present portrait she is clothed, alert and upright, her omniscient gaze demonstrating that she is in complete command of her subjects: the artist, her lover, clearly held completely in her thrall,” it said.