Picasso painting sets record, selling for $179 million
Life-size sculpture makes its own mark, going for $141 million
NEW YORK A vibrantly colored Picasso painting of a harem of women in Algiers became the highest selling painting ever at auction.
Les Femmes d’Alger, or Women of Algiers (Version O), fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s New York Monday night, the auction house announced.
Also at the auction, Alberto Giacometti’s life-size sculpture Pointing Man sold for more than $141 million, setting a sculpture record. The work depicts a skinny, 5-foot-high bronze figure with extended arms.
The auction record for a painting had been $142 million for Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud, in 2013. The sculpture record was $104 million, for Giacometti’s Walking Man I.
Picasso’s oil-on-canvas painting full of vibrant reds, bright yellows and electric blues created in the 1950s is part of a series, according to Christie’s. The Spanish painter was inspired by an 1834 work by Eugene Delacroix that now sits in the Louvre.
Picasso intended the series to be an elegy to his friend, Matisse, who died just weeks before Picasso started the works.
Picasso spoke of creating his own version, author Francoise Gilot wrote, saying he had her take him to see the Delacroix painting once a month. The Delacroix work featured women in a harem smoking from a hookah.
The painting was among two dozen masterpieces from the 20th century Christie’s offered in a curated sale titled “Looking Forward to the Past.”
The prices are guided by investment value as well as collector behavior, experts say.
“I don’t really see an end to it, unless interest rates drop sharply, which I don’t see happening in the near future,” Manhattan dealer Richard Feigen said told the Associated Press.
Impressionist and modern artworks continue to corner the market because “they are beautiful, accessible and a proven value,” Sarah Lichtman, professor of design history and curatorial studies at The New School, told the news organization.