The auction house Sotheby’s has auctioned, in a night art sale, an authentic artistic jewel, a museum-worthy work by the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso known as ‘Bust de femme’. The work went on sale this November for a price of between 9 and 12 million dollars (between 8.3 and 11.1 million euros at the current exchange rate). At the moment the auction house has not published the final price that the work reached.
This work was painted by the artist in 1949
This painting, a portrait of one of the most emblematic figures in his life, was made by the Spanish artist at the height of his relationship with his partner and mother of his children. Françoise Gilot. Dated March 24, 1949, the work belongs to a limited group of portraits that the artist created over the course of a year, depicting his wife with labyrinthine contours and rich jewel tones.
His affair with Gilot, a woman 40 years his junior, lasted a decade and deeply influenced his artistic production. Thus, the paintings and sculptures of that period reflect a high sense of vitality, chromatic richness and artistic freedom visible in this painting. Picasso’s images from the 1940s associate his partner and muse with themes of rebirth and renewal and many portray her as a mystical combination of the human and plant domains. The calligraphic black lines within this frame give the subject a stem-like structure.
Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot
The present work is among the finest examples of Picasso’s 1948-49 portraits of Françoise ever to come to market. Many of them are found in museum collections, hence the great value of this piece, a painting so rare and exceptional never before seen at auction that has been preserved in the Neumann Family Collection since 1951at which time Morton G. Neuman acquired it from the artist’s main dealer in Paris, le Galerie Lousie Leiris. Neuman was known as Picasdo’s favorite American collector; in fact, they were friends, so he acquired several of his works.
Between 1980 and 1981 this painting was exhibited along with others from the family’s personal collection at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Gallery in Washington DC, and Since then it had not been seen in public again, hence its high value.
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