Femme à la montre (Woman with a Watch)

One day in August 1932

Picasso dated this canvas exactly. On the stretcher he wrote 'Boisgeloup' and '17 Août XXXII': August 17, 1932, at the château he kept at Boisgeloup, near Gisors. He had bought the property in 1930 and used it as a sculpture studio.

The painting shows a young woman sitting upright in an armchair against a brilliant blue background. She wears a green checked blouse and a wristwatch, the detail that gives the picture its title. She looks straight at the viewer. Compared with Picasso's earlier Cubist work, the composition is built from curves rather than broken angles.

Picasso was 50. The year 1932 has been called his annus mirabilis, his year of wonders.

Marie-Thérèse, and the watch

Marie-Thérèse Walter was born July 13, 1909, in Le Perreux, France. On January 8, 1927, Picasso stopped her outside the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris. She was 17. He was 45 and married to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova. He told her: 'You have an interesting face. I would like to do a portrait of you. I am Picasso.'

Because of her age and his marriage, the affair was kept secret from many of the people around them. Walter's mother eventually learned of it and befriended Picasso. By 1932 Marie-Thérèse was appearing openly in a series of large canvases, and this is one of them.

The relationship lasted until 1940. Their daughter, Maya, was born September 5, 1935. In 1936 Picasso began a relationship with the photographer Dora Maar. Marie-Thérèse Walter died by suicide on October 20, 1977, in Juan-les-Pins.

The year of wonders

In 1932 Picasso held a major retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. It included many portraits of Marie-Thérèse and made the affair public for the first time. The show was a great success, and it firmly established Picasso as a famous, and controversial, artist. He painted Femme à la montre shortly after it closed.

Outside the studio, 1932 was a hard year. Unemployment in the United States reached about a third of the workforce. The infant son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped in March. In May, French president Paul Doumer was shot in Paris and died the next day. In July the Nazi party became the largest party in the German Reichstag, and in November Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover.

From the studio to a New York mantel

Picasso kept the painting for 34 years. In 1966 the Swiss dealer Ernst Beyeler bought it directly from the artist's studio in Mougins, and showed it in his Basel gallery's exhibition 'Picasso Works 1932 to 1965' in February and March 1967. It also appeared on the exhibition poster.

Pace Gallery in New York acquired the painting from Beyeler in 1968, and in November 1968 the collector Emily Fisher Landau bought it from Pace. It hung above the mantel in her Manhattan apartment. Landau, a principal in her family's real estate firm and a major donor to the Whitney Museum of American Art, built a collection of roughly 1,500 works and in 1991 opened the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, Queens.

Besides hanging at home, and later at her own art center, the painting went out on loan: to the Whitney in New York for 'Picasso and American Art' in 2006, to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach in 2014-15 and again in 2022, and to the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2018.

Landau died in March 2023 at 102. On November 8, 2023, the painting was offered as the tenth lot of an evening sale of her collection in New York. The estimate was available on request and reported at about $120 million. Three bidders competed on the phones. Reports differ on the opening bid: one gives $95 million, another $100 million. The hammer fell at $121 million to a phone bidder, for a total of $139.4 million with fees.

What the sale meant

The result was the second-highest auction price ever paid for a Picasso, behind Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O), which brought $179.4 million in 2015. The selling house's chairman called it the star lot of the year. Landau's collection as a whole brought about $425 million across two sales, a record for a collection from a woman collector.

Picasso's 1932 portraits of Marie-Thérèse have repeatedly set his highest prices. Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, painted the same year, sold for $106.5 million at auction in May 2010.

The numbers

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

130 x 97 cm (51 1/8 x 38 1/8 in)

Catalogue raisonné

Zervos, vol. VIII (1957), no. 132; Palau i Fabre (2011), no. 343

Inscriptions

Signed 'Picasso' at upper left; 'Boisgeloup' and '17 Août XXXII' on the stretcher

Current owner

Not public. Bought by an anonymous phone bidder in 2023

Timeline

1. Jan 8, 1927

   Picasso, 45, approaches 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter outside the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

2. Jul 1930

   Picasso buys the Château de Boisgeloup near Gisors and sets up a sculpture studio there.

3. 1932

   Picasso's retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris shows many portraits of Marie-Thérèse and makes the affair public.

4. Aug 17, 1932

   Picasso paints Femme à la montre at Boisgeloup and dates the stretcher.

5. Sep 5, 1935

   Maya, the daughter of Picasso and Marie-Thérèse, is born.

6. 1936

   Christian Zervos publishes the painting under the title Peinture, dated 1933.

7. 1957

   Zervos catalogs the painting in volume VIII as no. 132, titled Femme Assise à la Montre-Bracelet.

8. 1966

   Ernst Beyeler buys the painting directly from Picasso in Mougins.

9. Feb 1967

   Shown in 'Picasso Works 1932 to 1965' at Galerie Beyeler, Basel, through March.

10. 1968

    Pace Gallery, New York, acquires it from Beyeler.

11. Nov 1968

    Emily Fisher Landau buys it from Pace. It hangs above her Manhattan mantel for decades.

12. Oct 20, 1977

    Marie-Thérèse Walter dies in Juan-les-Pins.

13. 1991

    Landau opens the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, Queens.

14. Sep 2006

    Lent to 'Picasso and American Art' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

15. 2018

    On loan to the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

16. Mar 2022

    Shown in 'A Remarkable Gathering: The Fisher Landau Family Collection' at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach.

17. Mar 2023

    Emily Fisher Landau dies at 102.

18. Nov 8, 2023

    Sold at auction in New York for $139.4 million with fees, on a hammer price of $121 million.

The world in 1932

• Mar 1, 1932

  Charles Lindbergh Jr., the infant son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is kidnapped from the family home near Hopewell, New Jersey.

• Mar 19, 1932

  The Sydney Harbour Bridge opens.

• May 6, 1932

  French president Paul Doumer is shot in Paris. He dies the next day.

• May 20, 1932

  Amelia Earhart flies solo across the Atlantic, landing in Northern Ireland after 14 hours 54 minutes.

• Jul 30, 1932

  The Summer Olympics open in Los Angeles.

• Jul 31, 1932

  The Nazis become the largest party in the Reichstag, with 37 percent of the vote.

• Nov 8, 1932

  Franklin D. Roosevelt defeats Herbert Hoover in a landslide.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Femme à la montre (Woman with a Watch) is number 2 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (2 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Early catalogs got the date wrong. Zervos dated the painting 1933, and a 2011 catalog dated it early 1932. The stretcher says August 17, 1932.
• When Zervos first published it in 1936, it ran under the plain title Peinture, which means 'painting.'
• The painting was the image on the poster for Ernst Beyeler's 1967 Picasso exhibition in Basel.
• Emily Fisher Landau owned it for 55 years, from November 1968 until her death in 2023.