A Pablo Picasso painting fetched $1.6 million
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«Busta de Femme» by Pablo Picasso at an auction in Tokyo. Sold for $1.6 million
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Japanese auction house Shinwa Art Auction recently held in Tokyo important sales dedicated to works by top XX century artists. The event featured paintings by such famous masters as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Bernard Buffet, Maurice Vlaminck and Moise Kisling.
The unquestionable highlight of the auction was an oil painting «Buste de Femme» which fetched stunning 180 million yen ($1.6 million). The lot, preliminary estimated at 130-200 million yen ($1.2–1.8 million), was drawn in Picasso’s Cubist style in 1960 and depicts a woman's profile and face. The mostly gray oil painting was modeled on Jacqueline Locke, the Frenchwoman with whom Picasso spent the last 20 years until his death in 1973.
According to the auction house the winning bidder lives in Japan. The company also declined to disclose how the works came onto the market for reasons of privacy. Artwork by Western masters became status symbols in Japan during its rapid rise into the world's second largest economy after World War II, but many paintings were sold off after the so-called «bubble economy» collapsed in the early 1990s.
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