New Picasso portrait unveiled at Paris auction house

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

Entitled “Bust of a Woman With a Flowery Hat”, it depicts Dora Maar, a French photographer, painter and poet who was Picasso’s best-known muse.

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

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

Agnes Sevestre-Barbe, a Picasso specialist present during the unveiling of the work, said it was “unknown to the public and never exhibited, except in the Spanish master’s studio in Paris” during the German occupation of World War II.

She added that it was “quite exceptional and marks a milestone in the history of art and in that of Picasso”.

The painting shows Maar with a melancholy but harmonious face, wearing a colourful flowery hat, at a moment when the macho Spanish painter was abandoning her for a younger artist, Francoise Gilot.

Maar was Picasso’s most important model and muse, with some 60 works based on her.

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

Other famed cubist renderings of Maar include “Portrait of Dora Maar” and “Bust of a Woman”.

Their tumultuous nine-year affair, conducted almost entirely in Spanish, began in 1936 and is credited by some with helping Picasso rekindle his creative spark.

But their messy breakup saw Maar plunge into depression, adding to the list of jilted women who suffered the consequences of Picasso’s infidelity and impulsive personality.

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

‘Rare’ sale

The sellers of “Bust of a Woman With a Flowery Hat” (“Buste de femme au chapeau à fleurs” in French) are divesting the painting as part of an inheritance settlement.

“The cheerful colours are surprising: it’s 1943, a difficult year with rather dark works from this period,” Olivier Picasso, the painter’s grandson, told 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, as 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 slumped in recent years.

Picasso sales totalled $223 million in 2024, around a third of the $597 million spent on the Spanish master the previous year, auction data from consultancy Artprice showed in March.

Other paintings of Dora Maar have sold for many times more than the reserve price of $9.5 million for “Bust of a Woman With a Flowery Hat”.

In 2006, “Dora Maar au chat” (“Dora Maar With Cat”) was sold for $95 million in New York, while “Femme assise dans un jardin” (“Woman Sat in a Garden”) was acquired in 1999, also in New York, for $49 million.

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

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

By Sandra Biffot-Lacut