Recently, a portrait of the famous artist Pablo Picasso by the photographer Dora Maar was sold at Sotheby’s in London for 1.3 million pounds sterling (1.7 million US dollars).
The work, whose original price was set at 600-800 thousand pounds sterling, was painted by Picasso in November 1936, during the first days of his acquaintance with Dora Maar, and gifted to her for her own keeping. The painting was kept in the owner’s home until his death in 1997, and then became part of the valuable collection of British executive Joe Lewis.
Over two days of competitive auctions, works of art from Joe Lewis’s collection worth a total of more than 305 million pounds sterling (400 million dollars) were sold. This auction, which was recorded as the most expensive collection owned by a single person in Europe for the first time in the history of art, significantly exceeded the initial expectation of 200 million pounds sterling. A portrait of Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani was the most expensive piece in the collection, selling for 48.2 million pounds (63.5 million dollars). The sale also saw the sale of works by world-renowned artists including Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
