New Picasso portrait unveiled at Paris auction house

A portrait previously unknown to Pablo Picasso of one of his lovers was revealed Thursday after being put up auction in Paris with a reserve price of eight million euros ($ 9.5 million).

Entitled “a woman’s bust with a flowery hat”, he portrays Dora Maar, a French photographer, painter and poet who was the best known muse in Picasso.

Painted with oil, the colorful work measuring 80 x 60 centimeters (31 x 24 inches) “is estimated at around eight million euros, a reserve price that could soar”, according to Christophe Lucien at the Parisian auction house Drouot.

He was painted by Picasso on July 11, 1943 and acquired in August 1944 by a private French collector who is the grandfather of current anonymous owners.

Agnes Sevestre-Barbe, Picasso specialist present during the unveiling of the work, said that she was “unknown to the public and never exposed, except in the Spanish master studio in Paris” during the German Occupation of the Second World War.

She added that it was “quite exceptional and marks an important step in the history of art and that of Picasso”.

The painting shows Maar with a melancholy but harmonious face, wearing a colorful flowery hat, at a time when the Spanish painter Macho abandoned him for a younger artist, Françoise Gilot.

Maar was the most important model and muse of Picasso, with sixty works based on her.

She is the subject of her portraits “The Weeping Woman”, and they collaborated on her masterpiece “Guernica”, with Maar photographing the black and white anti-war and Picasso work using her images to develop the web.

The other famous Cubist yields of Maar include “Portrait of Dora Maar” and “a woman’s bust”.

Their nine -year tumultuous affair, almost entirely directed in Spanish, started in 1936 and was credited with some for having helped Picasso to rekindle its creative spark.

But their disorderly rupture saw Maar plunge into depression, adding to the list of women with bankruptcy who have undergone the consequences of infidelity and impulsive personality of Picasso.

Two of them – the former lover of adolescents Marie -Therese Walter and the second wife Jacqueline Roque – committed suicide.

Sale “ rare ”

The sellers of “a woman’s bust with a flowery hat” (“woman’s bust with a flower hat” in French) disinvest the painting as part of a heritage colony.

“The joyful colors are surprising: it is 1943, a difficult year with rather dark works of this period,” said Olivier Picasso, the painter’s grandson, to AFP after studying a photo of the work, which he has not yet seen in person.

“A painting, and moreover a portrait of Dora Maar, is rare. For it to be sold in France is really very rare, because it is on the market in general,” he added.

Pablo Picasso sales are used as a leading indicator for the art market as a whole, which has dropped in recent years.

Picasso sales totaled $ 223 million in 2024, around a third of the $ 597 million spent for the Spanish master the previous year, data on consultancy artprice auctions showed in March.

Other Dora Maar paintings have sold for several times more than the reserve price of $ 9.5 million for “the bust of a woman with a flowery hat”.

In 2006, “Dora Maar to the Cat” (“Dora Maar With Cat”) was sold for $ 95 million in New York, while “woman sitting in a garden” (“Woman Sathed a Garden”) was acquired in 1999, also in New York, for $ 49 million.

The last major sale for a Picasso took place in May this year at Sotheby’s in New York, where “seated” of Picasso, a painting of a musketeer seated from 1969, sold $ 15.1 million.

The record sale for one of his works was “The Women of Algiers (version O)”, an oil painting from 1955 which sold for $ 179.4 million at Christie’s in New York in 2015.

© 2025 AFP