Pablo Picasso’s long-hidden portrait Buste de femme au chapeau à fleurs (Dora Maar) (1943) was sold for €32.01 million ($37.15 million) by the auction house Lucien Paris on October 24th. (All prices include fees.) The sale, held at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, marked the first time the work was shown since its acquisition in 1944.
For more than 80 years prior to this month’s sale, Buste de femme au chapeau à fleurs (Dora Maar) had remained in the private collection of the family that originally acquired it. The work was previously known to the public only through a photograph by French Hungarian artist Brassaï and a black-and-white reproduction in Christian Zervos’s catalogue raisonné for the artist. The portrait depicts Surrealist artist Dora Maar, Picasso’s muse and romantic partner throughout the 1930s and ’40s. Though long overshadowed by Picasso, Maar has recently received wider recognition for her own artwork.
This work is part of Picasso’s “Woman in a Hat” series, completed during the final years of his relationship with Maar and under the constraints of wartime Paris. For this series, Picasso also painted French model Marie-Thérèse Walter and his wife Jacqueline Roque. Maar was also featured in Picasso’s “Weeping Woman” series, which was completed in 1937.
“To rediscover such a work, in all its authenticity and intensity, and to see it take flight under the hammer at Drouot, is a rare privilege and a moment of pure grace for any auctioneer—and for all art lovers,” Christophe Lucien, who conducted the sale, said in a statement.
Over the course of a 35-minute bidding war, approximately 18 bidders from Europe, Asia, and the United States competed for the work before an international collector in the room made the winning bid.
“This is a well-deserved result for what I consider a true Mona Lisa of the 20th century,” Picasso specialist Agnès Sevestre-Barbé said in a statement.
This sale marks the highest auction result of the year in France and the second-highest price ever achieved for Picasso in the country. The highest price for a Picasso sold in France was set by Les Noces de Pierrette (1905), sold for $51.35 million by Binoche et Godeau in 1989. Picasso’s auction record is held by Les Femmes d’Alger (Version “O”) (1955), which sold for $179.36 million at Christie’s New York in 2015.
