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A portrait of Pablo Picasso’s Femme à la montre has sold for $139.4 million on November 8th at auction in New York, making it the second most valuable work by the 20th-century artist.
The portrait is from one of the most prolific years of the Spanish artist’s career, which was the subject of an entire exhibition organised by the Musée Picasso in Paris and London’s Tate Modern in 2018.
Picasso painted Femme A La Montre when he was 50 and after he had already reached widespread fame. According to Tate Modern, the painting aimed to silence critics who questioned “whether he was an artist of the past rather than the future.”
