Picasso’s ‘Woman with a Watch’ fetches $139m

NEW YORK – One of Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces, “Woman with a Watch,” was sold at auction Wednesday night for US$139.3 million by Sotheby’s in New York, the second-highest price ever achieved for the artist.

In a jam-packed room at the venerable auction house, it only took a few minutes of telephone bidding for the 1932 painting depicting one of the Spanish artist’s companions and muses, the French painter Marie-Therese Walter, to be sold.

“Femme a la montre” had been valued at over $120 million before going on the block, according to Sotheby’s.

It was part of the house’s special sale this week of the collection of New York arts patron Emily Fisher Landau, who died this year at age 102.

Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s head of impressionist and modern art, called the Picasso canvas — which hung in Landau’s living room — “a masterpiece by every measure.”

“Painted in 1932 –…