(VOVWORLD) - Pablo Picasso’s 1932 painting “Femme à la montre” sold for more than 139 million USD on Wednesday at a Sotheby’s New York auction, making it the most valuable work of art sold globally at an auction this year.
 Pablo Picasso’s Femme à la montre from the Emily Fisher Landau Collection.
(Photographer: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
|
The nine-digit price made it the second most-expensive Picasso painting to sell at auction, behind “Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’),” which fetched 179.3 million USD, including a buyer’s premium, at Christie’s in 2015.
“Femme à la montre,” which translates from French to “Woman with a Watch,” is a portrait of the artist’s lover Marie-Thérèse Walter seated in a throne-like chair against a blue background.
The titular wristwatch is a motif also seen in artwork Picasso made of his wife, Russian-Ukrainian ballerina Olga Khokhlova.