Pablo Picasso painted photographer Dora Maar many times during the course of their seven-year relationship. One of these paintings, 1943’s Bust of a Woman with a Flowered Hat (Dora Maar), was shown to the public for the first time in 80 years at the auction house Lucien Paris for three days last week.
On October 24, it sold to a buyer in the room for $37 million (including fees), almost four times its $9.5 million estimate. That amount, however, pales in comparison to Picasso’s auction record: $179.4 million for the 1955 canvas Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’), set in 2015 at Christie’s New York.
Auctioneer Christophe Lucien told the Associated Press that the price “was not only well above estimates but also the highest paid at auction this year for any artwork in France.”
Bust of a Woman with a Flowered Hat (Dora Maar) was purchased in 1944, a year after Picasso painted it. It has been owned by the same family ever since; the current seller inherited it from a grandparent. Before its unveiling at the auction venue Hôtel Drouot, it had only been exhibited a few times, and was know primarily from a handful of black-and-white photographs by Brassaï that were reproduced in Picasso’s catalogue raisonée.
The painting was finished during the end of Picasso and Maar’s relationship. “You see that she was containing tears because she understood that Picasso was leaving her,” Lucien said at the preview.
Maar was also the subject of Picasso’s well-known “Weeping Woman” series. Despite being almost exclusively identified for decades as Picasso’s mistress, lover, and/or muse, Maar was also an artist in her own right, whose work has recently become widely recognized.
