Picasso up for auction

A RARE nude drawing by Picasso of his lover Marie-Therese Walter is to be sold by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in Paris later this month, Christie’s said.

MoMA is putting the ink drawing Flute Player and Reclining Nude under the hammer to raise money for its acquisitions fund.

The auction house said the work from 1932 – which has never before been sold – is one of a series of drawings in which the artist revealed his passion for the French teenager he met in the street in 1927 when she was 17 and he 46.