The work "Femme à la montre" by the famous painter Picasso from 1932 has been sold at auction for 139 million dollars, becoming the most expensive work sold globally this year, reports Reuters.
The work was part of the collection of the late philanthropist, Emily Fisher Landau.
The high price has made the work "Femme à la montre" the second most expensive of Picasso's paintings that have been sold at auction. The first was "Les femmes d'Alger (Version 'O')".
The work "Femme à la montre" which translates from French as "Woman with a wristwatch", is a portrait of the author's girlfriend, Marie-Thérèse Walter.
The titular wristwatch is also a motif seen in the works of art that Picasso made for his wife, the Russian-Ukrainian ballerina Olga Khokhlova.
Walter was 17 when she met Picasso, then 45, in Paris. Then they entered into a secret extramarital affair while he was still married to Khokhlova.
Walter later became the subject of many of the painter's works, including the 1932 painting, "Femme nue couchée," which sold at auction for $67.5 million in 2022.
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Picasso painted "Femme à la montre" in a crucial year in his career. At 50, he had already achieved widespread fame by 1932, but increased his ambitions to silence critics who asked "if he was an artist of the past rather than the future," according to the Tate Modern museum.
Fisher Landau bought the painting from New York gallery Pace in 1968 and kept it in her Manhattan apartment, according to Sotheby's.
An anonymous buyer beat out two other bidders for the painting.
