Sotheby’s will auction a Pablo Picasso painting of Françoise Gilot during a modern art evening sale on November 18. Last exhibited to the public in 1981, the piece comes to auction from the Neumann Family Collection and will be given a $9 million–$12 million estimate.
Picasso’s painting Buste de femme (1949) is a “late, but great addition” to the auction house’s Modern Evening Sale on November 18, with an estimate of $9 million to $12 million.
The painting, titled Buste de femme (1949), “has just been sitting on a wall,” where it has been “appreciating in value over the decades,” said Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of Impressionist and modern art for the Americas.
An artist in her own right, Gilot died last year at 101. She was Picasso’s longtime partner—he was 40 years older than her—and the mother to two of his children, Claude and Paloma. In her memoir, Gilot wrote of their relationship as being tumultuous.
Dawes said that the painting, with its bright color palette, “speaks to a moment in which Picasso was exceptionally happy and enamored of Gilot.”
Morton G. Neumann, the Chicago businessman who made his fortune in the mail-order business, acquired the painting in 1951 from Picasso’s main art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Nearly three decades later, Buste de femme was shown as part of an exhibition about the Neumann familary’s collection that appeared at the National Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1980 and 1981, respectively.
Portraits of Picasso’s other romantic partners tend to fare better on the auction block. Portraits of Jacqueline Roque can sell for more than $50 million while paintings of Dora Maar have been auctioned for nearly $100 million. Dawes said he was particularly interested in seeing how the market for portraits of Gilot could be reset: “I think that it’s paintings like this, which are as fresh and as exquisite, that have the ability to kind of recalibrate people’s expectations for what a given subject can be worth.”
Interest in Gilot’s life as an artist before and after her relationship to Picasso might also affect bidding activity in Buste de femme. “When people become intensely fascinated by that person, then the meaning of a portrait of them is increased and, by extension, the value,” Dawes said. “That kind of intrigue and fascination and appreciation of Gilot right now is at a peak. It’ll be very interesting to see how that translates into value. And I think there could be real price discovery in this case.”
