Femme assise près d'une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse)

A queen in a chair

Pablo Picasso dated this canvas to a single day: "Boisgeloup 30 Octobre XXXII," written on a piece of its original stretcher. Boisgeloup was the 18th-century château in Normandy he had bought in 1930, with a tower studio looking over the village and stables he converted for sculpture. It gave him a place to work, and to keep a private life, away from Paris.

The painting shows Marie-Thérèse Walter seated upright in a chair, facing the viewer. The 2013 sale catalog quoted the critic Patrick McCaughey, who called it "the solemn and luminous Woman seated by the window" and wrote that it "achieves a classical calm and repose." Ahead of the 2021 sale, a specialist saw something sharper: "Marie-Thérèse wasn't asleep, she wasn't passive, she had an agency, she was vigilant, she was present." Another pointed to its scale: "At five feet tall, she lives on the canvas."

Thick white pigment is incised to draw the outlines of her face, so the surface hovers between painting and sculpture, fitting for a work made in Picasso's sculpture studio. Accounts of the 2021 sale noted that the seated figure appears winged, set against the window behind her.

Picasso and Marie-Thérèse

Marie-Thérèse Walter was born on July 13, 1909, in Le Perreux, outside Paris. She met Picasso on January 8, 1927, outside the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris. She was 17; he was 45 and married to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova.

For years the affair was kept hidden. Picasso used Boisgeloup as a place to see her apart from his family, and she became the subject of a series of portraits that defined his work of 1932. One of the specialists handling the 2021 sale described the change she set off in his painting, with 1932 "considered the high point."

Their daughter, María de la Concepción, known as Maya, was born on September 5, 1935. By then Picasso was seeing other women; around 1936 he began a relationship with the photographer Dora Maar, and his relationship with Marie-Thérèse ended in 1940. She died by suicide on October 20, 1977, four years after Picasso's death in 1973.

Picasso's year of wonders

Picasso turned 50 in October 1931, and 1932 was the year he took stock of his own career in public. In June he opened a large retrospective in Paris at the Galeries Georges Petit, taking full control of the hanging, refusing a chronological order and mixing new 1932 canvases among older work so that everything read as current. He famously went to the cinema instead of attending the opening. The show then traveled to Zurich, where in early September he visited his first major museum exhibition.

Its many pictures of Marie-Thérèse, including The Dream, put his new muse on public view, and according to the 2013 sale catalog it was at this show that his wife Olga recognized a face that was not her own. Picasso and Olga later separated but never divorced.

In 2017 and 2018 this painting was shown in Picasso 1932, the exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris and Tate Modern in London that walked visitors through that year month by month. Late in the year, according to the Tate, Marie-Thérèse contracted a serious viral infection after swimming in the river Marne, and some of Picasso's last pictures of 1932 show her being rescued from the water.

From the family to the record books

The painting's recorded provenance begins with Marina Picasso, the artist's granddaughter. From her it passed to the dealer Jan Krugier and then to the New York dealer Stephen Hahn, who acquired it in 1985. Along the way it toured widely: Picasso retrospectives in Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt and Zurich in 1981 and 1982, Venice in 1981, Tokyo and Kyoto in 1983, Melbourne and Sydney in 1984, and New York gallery shows in 1985, 2008 and 2011.

It first came to auction in New York on May 14, 1997, where it sold for $6.8 million, or $7.5 million with fees, to a private collector. On February 5, 2013, an anonymous collector offered it in London with an estimate of £25 million to £35 million. It sold for £28,601,250, about $44.8 million, to a third-party guarantor who had committed an irrevocable bid before the sale.

In 2021 the painting returned to auction with an estimate of about $55 million and a guarantee in place, after previews in Hong Kong in April and in London. On the evening of May 13, 2021, in New York, telephone bidders fought over it for about 20 minutes. It hammered at $90 million and sold for $103,410,000 with fees. The buyer was not named, and reports differ: one says a client bidding by phone, another an online bidder in California.

It was the first work of art of any kind to pass $100 million at auction since the spring of 2019, and only the fifth Picasso painting to do so. It narrowly missed the record for a picture of Marie-Thérèse, set in 2010 when Nude, Green Leaves and Bust sold for about $106 million.

How to know it

The painting is identified by its inscription, "Boisgeloup 30 Octobre XXXII," on an original stretcher piece; XXXII is 1932 in Roman numerals. It is oil on canvas, 146 by 114 centimeters (57 1/2 by 44 7/8 inches).

Titles of Picasso's Marie-Thérèse pictures blur together. This one is Femme assise près d'une fenêtre (Woman Sitting Near a Window); in 2013 it was offered under that title alone, and in 2021 it carried the sitter's name, Marie-Thérèse, in parentheses. One 2021 preview article dated it to the spring of 1932, but the inscription and the sale catalogs give October 30, 1932.

The 2013 catalog cites it in John Richardson's Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter (1985, no. 72), in The Picasso Project's survey of the Surrealist years (no. 32-178) and in Josep Palau i Fabre's Picasso: From the Minotaur to Guernica (no. 302).

The numbers

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

146 x 114 cm (57 1/2 x 44 7/8 in)

Inscription

"Boisgeloup 30 Octobre XXXII" on an original stretcher piece

Catalogue raisonné

The Picasso Project no. 32-178; Palau i Fabre no. 302

Current owner

Private collection; the 2021 buyer was not named

Timeline

1. Jan 8, 1927

   Picasso meets 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter outside the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

2. 1930

   Picasso buys the Château de Boisgeloup in Normandy and converts its stables into a sculpture studio.

3. Oct 30, 1932

   Picasso paints Femme assise près d'une fenêtre at Boisgeloup and dates it on the stretcher.

4. Sep 5, 1935

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

5. 1981

   Shown in Picasso retrospectives in Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt and Zurich (1981 to 1982) and in Venice.

6. 1983

   Exhibited in Tokyo and Kyoto.

7. 1984

   Exhibited in Melbourne and Sydney.

8. 1985

   Acquired by the New York dealer Stephen Hahn; it had come from Marina Picasso through Jan Krugier.

9. May 14, 1997

   Sells at auction in New York for $7.5 million with fees, its first auction appearance.

10. Feb 5, 2013

    Sells at auction in London for £28,601,250 (about $44.8 million) to a third-party guarantor.

11. 2017

    Included in Picasso 1932 at the Musée Picasso in Paris, which traveled to Tate Modern in London in 2018.

12. Apr 2021

    Previewed in Hong Kong and London ahead of its New York sale.

13. May 13, 2021

    Sells at auction in New York for $103,410,000 with fees after about 20 minutes of bidding.

The world in 1932

• Mar 1, 1932

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

• Mar 19, 1932

  The Sydney Harbour Bridge opens.

• Apr 14, 1932

  John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split the lithium nucleus at Cambridge.

• May 20, 1932

  Amelia Earhart sets off on her solo flight across the Atlantic, landing in Northern Ireland.

• Jul 30, 1932

  The Summer Olympics open in Los Angeles in the depths of the Great Depression.

• Jul 31, 1932

  The Nazi Party becomes the largest party in the German Reichstag.

• Nov 8, 1932

  Franklin D. Roosevelt defeats Herbert Hoover for the U.S. presidency.

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 assise près d'une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse) is number 5 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 (5 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Picasso was 45 and Marie-Thérèse Walter was 17 when they met outside a Paris department store in January 1927.
• The canvas is dated to a single day, October 30, 1932, with the year written in Roman numerals.
• Its price rose from $7.5 million in 1997 to $103.4 million in 2021, nearly fourteen times over.
• The 2021 sale was the first time any artwork had passed $100 million at auction since the spring of 2019.
• Even at $103.4 million it fell just short of the record for a Marie-Thérèse picture, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which sold for about $106 million in 2010.
• In 2013 it went to a single bidder: the guarantor who had committed to buy it before the sale began.