Picasso’s Blue Period work sells for £35m

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Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto, a work from the painter’s Blue Period, has sold for nearly £35 million at a London auction. The winning bid of £34,761,250, from an anonymous bidder at an auction at Christie’s on Wednesday night, was in the middle of the estimated sale price of £30 millions to £40 millions, the auctioneer said.
One of Claude Monet’s famous Water Lilies paintings, Nympheas, a work from 1906, failed to sell. It had been expected to fetch up to £40 million. Still, Christie’s said the total of £152,595,550 paid for 46 works of art set a record for an art auction in London. Another 16 paintings failed to sell. The Picasso was sold by musical theatre composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber to benefit his charitable foundation which supports architecture and the development of musical talent. “I am pleased that my foundation has raised over £30 million, especially in such austere times,” said Lloyd-Webber, who paid $29.2 million for the painting at a New York auction in 1995. Other significant sales in the auction of Impressionist art included Gustav Klimt’s Frauenbildnis (Portrait of Ria Munk III) for £18,801,250; Picasso’s Le baiser for £12,137,250; Vincent van Gogh’s Parc de l’hopital Saint-Paul for £9,001,250, and Nu a la chaise longue by Henri Matisse for £6,649,250.