Christie’s subastará una de las grandes pinturas surrealistas de Picasso
Pablo Picasso - La fenetre ouverte - 1929
Next March 1, 2022, Christie's will auction "La fenêtre ouverte" (1929), an important surrealist painting by Pablo Picasso, which carries a pre-sale estimate of £14 million to £24 million.
Image: Pablo Picasso, "La fenêtre ouverte," 1929.
“La fenêtre ouverte” was painted in 1929, a time of change in Picasso's life and career. In 1925 he “officially” joined André Breton’s surrealist movement, although his first works in this style did not arrive until a year later. In 1927 he began his relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was his muse for much of the following decade
Described by Christie's as "a seminal work of Pablo Picasso's Surrealist period" and as "a work of striking visual power," the painting -which comes up for auction for the first time since it was painted (having remained in the same private European collection for half a century)- has an estimated pre-sale price of £14 million to £24 million ($19 million to $32.5 million).
Considering the quality of the work, its large size and provenance, the estimate seems rather conservative, albeit Picasso's fully surrealist paintings have never fetched prices comparable to those of his more sensual (but not always more attractive) portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter, the most recent case being "Femme assise près d "une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse)" (1932) auctioned last year for $103.4 million. By comparison, "Le sauvetage" (The Rescue), an extraordinary fully surrealist work painted by Picasso that same year (and by any standards a more energetic, imaginative and vibrant work than the aforementioned portrait of Marie-Thérèse) fetched $31.5 million when it was auctioned in 2014.
Among the most recent results for fully surrealist works by Picasso, it is worth mentioning the $7.3 million paid last year for "Profil" (1930), the $4.8 million paid in 2020 for "Femme assise" (1929) or the $4.6 million also paid in 2020 for "Baigneuses au ballon" (1929), tripling the estimated presale price. However, none of them is comparable in scale and importance to "La fenêtre ouverte", which will be exhibited in New York, Hong Kong and London before the March 1 auction.

Read the full article