Picasso painting of lover on show in HK
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A Picasso painting on auction for the first time made its debut in Hong Kong at the start of a global tour yesterday and is expected to fetch US$50 million, auction house Sotheby’s said.
The painting — “Femme au beret et a la robe quadrillee (Marie-Therese Walter)” — is a colorful and angular depiction of Picasso’s French lover with a dark silhouette looming behind her face.
“Of all of the artist’s styles and decades, this is the one that most epitomizes the legacy of Picasso as a portraitist of women,” said Thomas Bompard of the Impressionist and Modern Art department at Sotheby’s in London.
Walter began her relationship with Picasso as his mistress and muse when she was 17 and committed suicide in 1977, four years after his death.
Picasso painted the portrait a few months after his masterpiece “Guernica” was conceived in 1937 in the depths of Spain’s devastating civil war.
The portrait is said to explore Picasso’s evolving relationship with Walter as French artist Dora Maar emerged as his new lover, according to Sotheby’s.
The features of a distraught Maar were the subject of another celebrated Picasso painting in the same year — “The Weeping Woman” — created in the wake of the Guernica series.
The piece is making its first stop in Hong Kong and will be on display until Friday before going to Taipei, New York and London. It will go be auctioned on February 28 in London.
A series of 100 etchings by Picasso, which deal with his erotic obsessions and marital strife as well as political turmoil in the 1930s, sold for US$2.2 million in Paris to an unnamed American collector last November.
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