The 1932 Pablo Picasso painting “Femme nue couchée” sold for $67.5 million at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday, the most recent significant sale of blue-chip art at auction.
The eight-digit sale price comes just a week after Christie’s sold Andy Warhol’s 1964 silk-screen image of Marilyn Monroe for $195 million, breaking the record for an American artist’s work sold at auction.
The Picasso painting, a surrealistic image of his muse Marie-Thérèse Walter, was expected to sell for more than $60 million, according to auction house Sotheby’s. The price on Tuesday is lower than that of other Marie-Thérèse portraits, one of which sold for $103.4 million at Christie’s last year.
“Femme nue couchée” was the result of Picasso’s most creative and pivotal year. By 1932, he was 50 years old and had already acquired global acclaim, but he stepped up his goals to silence critics who questioned “whether he was a past or future artist,” according to the Tate Modern museum.
The painting was purchased at Sotheby’s Modern Evening Sale in New York by Amy Cappellazzo, the former president of Sotheby’s global fine art business. Last year, she departed the auction company.
According to Sotheby’s, the vendor purchased the painting in 2008 from Picasso’s heirs, who had owned it for decades. Steve Cohen, the owner of the New York Mets and a hedge fund millionaire, was revealed as the seller by industry website Artnet.