Pablo Picasso's 1932 painting "Femme à la montre" has sold for $139.4m (£113m) at a Sotheby’s New York auction, making it the most valuable work of art sold globally at an auction this year.
It went under the hammer as part of an estimated $400 million (£325 million) sale of the collection of late philanthropist Emily Fisher Landau.
The nine-digit price made it the second most-expensive Picasso painting to sell at auction, behind "Les femmes d'Alger (Version 'O')", which fetched $179.3 million (£145 million), including a buyer's premium, at Christie's in 2015.
"Femme à la montre", which translates from French to "Woman with a Watch", is a portrait of the artist’s lover Marie-Thérèse Walter.
She is seated in a throne-like chair against a blue background. The titular wristwatch is a motif also seen in artwork Picasso made of his wife, Russian-Ukrainian ballerina Olga Khokhlova.
Walter was 17 years old when she met the 45-year-old Picasso in Paris, and the two later entered into a secret relationship while he was still married to Khokhlova.
Walter became his subject for a number of artworks, including the 1932 painting "Femme nue couchée," which sold for $67.5 million (£54 million) at auction in 2022.
Picasso painted "Femme à la montre" at a pivotal year in his career. At 50 years old, he had already achieved widespread fame by 1932 but ramped up his ambitions to silence critics who questioned "whether he was an artist of the past rather than the future," according to the Tate Modern museum.
Fisher Landau bought the painting from New York’s Pace Gallery in 1968 and kept it above the mantle in her Manhattan apartment, according to Sotheby’s.
An anonymous buyer beat out two other bidders for the painting.
Other artists to feature in the collection include American painter and sculptor Jasper Johns, Dutch-American artist Willem de Kooning, American painter and printmaker Robert Rauschenberg, abstract painter Mark Rothko as well as Edward Ruscha and Andy Warhol, who were both associated with the pop art movement.
Rothko’s 1958 piece Untitled features in the exhibition as does John’s 1986 oil on canvas art work Flags, depicting two American flags.
Warhol’s 1986 Self Portrait using acrylic and silkscreen on canvas also forms part of the collection, the piece having been completed months before the artist’s death in 1987.
The sale consists of around 120 pieces from Ms Landau's prestigious collection.
"Femme à la montre" was displayed in London in early October, as part of the travelling exhibition which also showcased in Paris, Taipei, Los Angeles, Dubai and Hong Kong.
A portrait by Picasso of his daughter Maya sold for more than £18 million at a Sotheby's auction in March.
Titled Fillette au bateau, Maya, it is a “joyful” portrait of the Spanish artist’s daughter, Maya Widmaier-Picasso – painted in 1938 when she was just two and a half years old.
On April 8 this year, the world marked 50 years since Picasso's death.
He is estimated to have completed 13,500 paintings during his life, along with around 100,000 prints and engravings.
