A rare
Picasso painting on auction for the first time made its debut in Hong Kong at
the start of a global tour on Tuesday (Jan 30) and is expected to fetch US$50
million (S$66 million), auction house Sotheby's said.
The
painting - Femme Au Beret Et A La Robe Quadrillee (Marie-Therese Walter) - is a
colourful and angular depiction of Picasso's French lover with a dark
silhouette looming behind her face.
Walter
began her relationship with Picasso as his mistress and muse when she was 17
and committed suicide in 1977, four years after his death.
Picasso
painted the portrait a few months after his masterpiece Guernica was conceived
in 1937 in the depths of Spain's devastating civil war.
The
portrait is said to explore Picasso's evolving relationship with Walter as
French artist Dora Maar emerged as his new lover, according to Sotheby's.
The
features of a distraught Maar were the subject of another celebrated Picasso
painting in the same year - The Weeping Woman - created in the wake of the
Guernica series.
The piece
is making its first stop in Hong Kong and will be on public display in the city
until Friday before travelling to Taipei, New York and London.
It will go
under the hammer on Feb 28 as part of Sotheby's impressionist and modern art
evening sale in London.
A series of
100 etchings by Picasso, which deal with his erotic obsessions and marital
strife as well as political turmoil in the 1930s, sold for 1.9 million euros
(S$3.08 million) in Paris to an unnamed American collector last November.
Picasso
held the world record for the most expensive piece of art sold at auction with
his The Women Of Algiers (Version 0), which fetched US$179.4 million at Christie's
in New York in 2015.
But last
November, Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi smashed that record by selling for
US$450.3 million in New York.
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