A work by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) from the famous collection of Emily Fisher Landau, who died in March, could fetch more than $120 million (about €112 million) at an auction in New York. The 1932 painting “Femme à la montre”, a portrait of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, was bought by the collector Landau in 1968 and then hung above the fireplace in her New York apartment for many years, Sotheby’s announced at a press conference on Wednesday.
The painting, along with around 120 other works, will now be auctioned in November. In total, Sotheby’s estimates the auction could bring in around $400 million.
At the end of the 1960s, Landau received a large insurance sum after jewelry was stolen and began buying art. Over the years she built up one of the world’s most important collections of modern art, with works by, among others, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Robert Mapplethorpe. For a time, Landau also ran a museum in the New York borough of Queens.
