Picasso’s ‘Femme assise robe bleue’ sells for $45 million

Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar has been sold at a Christie’s auction in New York for $45 million (£35m).

Femme Assise, Robe Bleu (Seated Woman in Blue Dress), which features one the Spanish artist’s many lovers, was seized by the Nazis during World War Two. However, French Resistance fighters intercepted it as the Germans were making their way from Paris to Moravia.

The painting, which had passed through the hands of eminent art dealer and collector Ernst Beyeler in the Sixties, had been sold in 2011 to the Geneva-based collector Dimitri Mavromatis for £18 million.

Marr, whose real name was Henriette Theodora Markovitch, was a photographer and painter.

She was Picasso’s lover from 1936 to 1944 and was the principal model for many of his “weeping women” portraits from the late 1930s, early 1940s.

The Seated Woman was sold on Monday night during the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening sale at the Rockefeller Centre in New York.

In May 2015, Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction when it fetched $179 million.

Courtesy Telegraph 

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