Picasso smashes record for most expensive auctioned artwork

A painting by Picasso sold for $179.4 million (€159.86 million) at Christie’s in New York last night creating a new world record price for any work of art sold at auction.

‘Les Femmes D’Alger (Version “O”’)’ - a 1955 painting by the Spanish artist - had a pre-auction estimate of $140 million (€124.75 million).

Bidding opened at $100 million and after over 11 minutes the hammer came down at $160 million to cheers and applause in the saleroom.

However when the auctioneers’ fees were added the unnamed buyer paid $179.4 million (€160 million). The painting last changed hands in 1997 - also at Christie’s, New York - when it sold for $31.9 million.

The result knocked Dublin-born artist Francis Bacon off the top spot. He had held the record for the highest price ever paid - $142.4 million set, also at Christie's in New York, in 2013, for 'Three Studies of Lucian Freud', a triptych portrait by Bacon of his friend and fellow artist.

Christie’s described ‘Les femmes d’Alger (Version “O”)’ - known, in English, as ‘The Women of Algiers’ - as “a milestone in Picasso’s oeuvre and one of his most famous masterpieces”

Pablo Picasso, who spent most of his life in France, died in 1973 aged 91. His most famous painting is ‘Guernica’ named after a village in the Basque country bombed during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso painted a series of fifteen variations of ‘Les Femmes d’Alger’ between December 1954 and February 1955. The paintings depict Algerian women in a harem smoking a hookah. Picasso designated the series alphabetically as versions “A” through “O”. The version sold last night - the last of the series - is ‘Version “O” - the 15th letter of the alphabet.

Later in last night’s auction, Christie’s also achieved a new world record price for sculpture when Giacometti’s ‘L’homme au doigt (Pointing Man)’ sold for $141.3 million (€126 million).

The life-size bronze made in 1947 by Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who died in 1966, had a pre-auction estimate $130 million. Giacometti made six casts of the piece plus one artist’s proof. Today, four are in major museums (including the Tate Modern in London and New York’s Museum of Modern Art).

The version sold last night has been owned by an unnamed private collector for the last 45 years and has never appeared at auction before.

The previous record price for sculpture at auction was for a piece also by Giacometti titled ‘L’Homme qui marche I (The Walking Man I)’ which sold for $ 103.9 in 2010 at Sotheby’s.