Pablo Picasso’s ‘Woman Sitting Near A Window’ Sells For $103.4m

A painting by Pablo Picasso has sold for more than $100m – marking the fifth work by the Spanish artist to sell for a nine-figure sum.

Woman Sitting Near a Window (Marie-Therese) sold for $103.4m (£73.5m) on Thursday at Christie’s auction house in New York.

That figure comprises $90m for the painting itself, with fees and commissions on top, Christie’s said.

The auction house had estimated the painting would sell for $55m.

The work, titled Femme Assise Pres d’Une Fenetre (Marie-Therese) in Spanish, was sold after 19 minutes of bidding.

Bonnie Brennan, president of Christie’s America, said the success of Thursday’s auction “signals a real return to normal and also a message that the art market is really back on track”.

Thursday’s auction marked the fifth work by Picasso to have sold for more than $100m.

He is one of a very small number of artists to have sold multiple works above this threshold, alongside Jackson Pollock, Vincent van Gogh and Francis Bacon.

The record for a Picasso is $179.4m (£127.6m), which was paid for his painting The Women of Algiers in 2015.

The last painting to fetch more than $100m was Claude Monet’s 1890 work Meules, which reached $110.7m in New York in 2019.

This is the first time in two years that a work has broken the $100m mark since an 1890 Claude Monet Meules painting reached $110.7m (£78.7m) at Sotheby’s, also in New York.