Salvador Dalí Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

ARTIST Salvador Dalí

TITLE 'Printemps Nécrophilique'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $8 million to $12 million

Timing is everything in the auction business. So it’s no accident that this Surrealist canvas — once owned by Elsa Schiaparelli, a Paris couturier closely associated with the Surrealist movement and who collaborated with Dalí on designs — is being offered for sale just days before the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations.”

From 1936, “Printemps Nécrophilique” is an eerie dreamscape with two figures that is also coming up for sale as the interest in Surrealism continues to escalate. “It’s one of the last great isms of art history to be fully appreciated,” said Simon Shaw, who runs Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department in New York. “The roots of more recent art can be found in some of these Surrealist paintings, so it crosses over successfully, appealing to contemporary collectors too.”

The last time “Printemps Nécrophilique” was at auction, in London at Christie’s in 1998, it fetched $2.2 million.

Edvard Munch's iconic painting, "The Scream," broke a world record tonight, becoming the most expensive artwork sold in an auction.

Estimates for the sale varied from $80 million to $200 million. The artwork -- which is not a painting but is pastel on cardboard -- ended up selling for $119,922,500, surpassing the previous record-holder, Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust," which sold for $106.5 million in 2010. Cezanne's "The Card Players" has the honor of going for the highest price, period (meaning not at auction) -- it was sold in a private sale to Qatar (yes, the country) for $250 million last year.

Check out our liveblog below of the highs and, well, higher highs, of the Sotheby's auction. Learn about the oft-stolen other versions of "The Scream" that Munch painted, as well as the exalted company of record-breakers he now keeps. And because nothing sets the mood for an ex post facto liveblog quite like blood and tongues, do read the text below of Munch's inscription, which appears on tonight's history-making work:

"I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city.

My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

 

Christie's

 

ARTIST Gerhard Richter

TITLE 'Abstraktes Bild (798-3)'

AUCTION HOUSE Christie's

ESTIMATE $14 million to $18 million

This dreamy 1993 canvas is sure to be a winner when it comes up for sale on May 8. Prices for the 80-year-old Mr. Richter have been steadily rising, helped in large part by a highly praised retrospective at the Tate Modern in London this winter, which is now at the National Gallery in Berlin and will be heading to the Pompidou Center in Paris in June. Last year alone some $200 million worth of works by Mr. Richter sold at auction. “It’s eye candy for the emerging buyer,” Mr. Gorvy said. The size of the canvas — it is nearly eight feet square — make it particularly impressive as does the masterly layering of colors, which is at once romantic and modern. It is being sold by Lyn Ross, the widow of George Ross, a financier from Bryn Mawr, Pa., who died in July.

 

Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

The work, a pastel on board, is one of four versions created by Edvard Munch; the other three are in museums in Norway. The buyer bid over the telephone.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: May 2, 2012

It took 12 nail-biting minutes and five eager bidders for Edvard Munch’s famed 1895 pastel of “The Scream” to sell for $119.9 million, becoming the world’s most expensive work of art ever to sell at auction.

 Bidders could be heard speaking Chinese and English (and, some said, Norwegian), but the mystery winner bid over the phone, through Charles Moffett, Sotheby’s executive vice president and vice chairman of its worldwide Impressionist, modern and contemporary art department. Gasps could be heard as the bidding climbed higher and higher, until there was a pause at $99 million, prompting Tobias Meyer, the evening’s auctioneer, to smile and say, “I have all the time in the world.” When $100 million was bid, the audience began to applaud.

The price eclipsed the previous record, made two years ago at Christie’s in New York when Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” brought $106.5 million.

Munch made four versions of “The Scream.” Three are now in Norwegian museums; the one that sold on Wednesday, a pastel on board from 1895, was the only one still in private hands. It was sold by Petter Olsen, a Norwegian businessman and shipping heir whose father was a friend, neighbor and patron of the artist.

The image has been reproduced endlessly in popular culture in recent decades, becoming a universal symbol of angst and existential dread and nearly as famous as the Mona Lisa.

Outside of Sotheby’s, there was excitement of a different kind, as demonstrators protesting the company’s longtime lockout of art handlers waved placards with the image of “The Scream” along with the motto, “Sotheby’s: Bad for Art.” Many in the group — a mix of union members and Occupy Wall Street protesters — even screamed themselves when the Munch went on the block. (Munch’s work was an apt focus for the group, said one protester, Yates McKee: “It exemplifies the ways in which objects of artistic creativity become the exclusive province of the 1 percent.”)

Inside, the atmosphere generated by the Munch’s record price carried through the rest of the auction, which saw high prices for everything from Picasso paintings to sculptures by Giacometti and Brancusi.

Of the 76 lots on offer, 15 failed to sell. The evening’s total was $330.56 million, close to its high estimate of $323 million. (Final prices include the buyer’s commission to Sotheby’s: 25 percent of the first $50,000; 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

As is often true of auctions with star attractions, having “The Scream” for sale helped win other business. Its inclusion was a draw, for example, for the estate of Theodore J. Forstmann, the Manhattan financier, who died in November. The top work in his collection was Picasso’s “Femme Assise Dans un Fauteuil,” a 1941 portrait of Dora Maar, the artist’s muse and lover, posed in a chair. The painting went for $26 million, or $29.2 million with fees, within its estimated $20 million to $30 million.

In 2004, Mr. Forstmann bought Soutine’s “Le Chasseur de chez Maxim’s,” a 1925 portrait of an employee at the celebrated French restaurant, for $6.7 million at a Sotheby’s auction. It had belonged to Wendell Cherry, vice chairman of the Louisville-based health care company Humana, who died in 1991, and his wife, Dorothy. On Wednesday night the painting was up for sale again, this time with a $10 million to $15 million estimate, which turned out to be optimistic. Two bidders went for the Soutine, which ended up selling to a telephone bidder, working through Mr. Moffett, for $8.3 million, or $9.3 million with fees.

More popular, however, was an 1892 Gauguin landscape, “Cabane Sous les Arbres,” which Mr. Forstmann had bought at Christie’s in 2002 for $4.6 million. On Wednesday night it was estimated to sell for $5 million to $7 million, but there were four bidders for the canvas, and it sold for $8.4 million.

Surrealism has been the rage recently, and Sotheby’s had many examples to sell. Among the best was Dalí’s “Printemps Nécrophilique,” a 1936 painting that once belonged to Elsa Schiaparelli, the Paris couturier closely associated with the Surrealist movement who collaborated on designs with Dalí. Six bidders fought over the painting, which went for $16.3 million, well above its $12 million high estimate.

Another popular Surrealist image was Ernst’s “Leonora in the Morning Light,” a 1940 painting that depicts his lover, Leonora Carrington, a Mexican artist of English birth, emerging from a lush jungle. It brought $7.9 million, above its $5 million high estimate.

A gilded bronze head that Brancusi conceived and cast in 1911 was another of the evening’s top sellers, bringing $12.6 million, well above its $6 million to $8 million estimate.

But it was the record price for “The Scream” that captured everyone’s imagination. As soon as the hammer fell, rumors began circulating about who the buyer could be. Among the names floated were the financier Leonard Blavatnik, the Microsoft tycoon Paul Allen and members of the Qatari royal family.

While some were surprised at the price, one Munch enthusiast was not: “It’s nice to see the centrality of Norway in the mainstream of western culture,” said Ivor Braka, a London dealer. “The scream is more than a painting, it’s a symbol of psychology as it anticipates the 20th-century traumas of mankind.”

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 2, 2012

 

A earlier version of this article misspelled the of surname of Theodore J. Forstmann, the Manhattan financier, as Fortsmann. It also incorrectly described the position Wendell Cherry, who died in 1991, had held at Humana. He was not chairman.

 

by brett sokol

Mañana (2009), from Ruscha’s On the Road exhibition

“The only people for me are the mad ones,” Jack Kerouac famously declared in his loosely autobiographical novel, On the Road, beckoning readers to take to the open road and seek out “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn….” Artist Ed Ruscha is just one of the many devoted fans who took Kerouac’s proviso to heart. But when he was first passed a copy of On the Road shortly after its 1957 publication, its author’s fevered travels came as less of an epiphany than an affirmation: “I read that and I felt like, Wow! This is very much what I’m already doing!” Ruscha recalls with a chuckle.

Indeed, in 1954, at the tender age of 16, Ruscha had already set off hitchhiking from his Oklahoma City hometown without much of a plan beyond spending the summer in South Florida. “It took 26 rides to get to Miami, and it took 26 rides to get back,” he says matter-of-factly. In between, he landed jobs as a busboy at restaurants a few blocks from the ocean and seemingly a galaxy away from Oklahoma. The work was hardly glamorous, but Ruscha says that horizon-expanding summer—from exploring the Everglades to the anything-but-buttoned-down surfside scene—made it clear that his future was neither in the Midwest nor in his father’s insurance trade.

Two years later, immediately after graduating high school, Ruscha lit out for Los Angeles and enrolled in the first art school that would accept him, Chouinard Art Institute. The rest, as the saying goes, is (art) history. Present-day critics consider him the progenitor of “California Cool,” as well as the West Coast’s answer to Andy Warhol. The art market heartily agrees: Sales of his paintings have fetched more than $21 million at auction in the last 12 months alone. (And that’s not even counting the private sales brokered by his dealers at the heavyweight Gagosian Gallery.)

On that note, call his new show at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art an aesthetic homecoming: Ruscha’s On the Road exhibition marries imposing landscapes with choice snippets of prose from Kerouac’s signature novel. “That book has always been important to me,” he explains. “I just needed an excuse to go back to it. I was doing paintings of mountaintops, and I began to see them as fractions of scenery—as though you would spot them driving down the road. I already had some favorite statements that are verbatim from the book, things I had marked that I wanted to spotlight. It all fell into line.”

The Estate of Francis Bacon/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS, London

 

ARTIST Francis Bacon

TITLE 'Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $30 million to $40 million

THE market hasn’t seen a record-breaking price for Bacon since the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich bought his 1976 “Triptych” for $86.3 million at Sotheby’s in May 2008. Since then prices have not come anywhere near that sum, but neither have the offerings. Now, on May 9, Sotheby’s is selling a 1976 canvas depicting a male figure who is thought to be the artist’s lover, George Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971.

The painting was the star of a 1977 exhibition of Bacon’s work at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris. It was the cover image of the show’s catalog and hung alongside the record-breaking “Triptych.” “It was such a popular show they had to close off the street,” said Mr. Meyer, who added that this painting is creating considerable buzz. One reason is that it has not been on the market for 35 years. Another is the painting itself, with the hypnotic reflections of the man in the mirror and on the floor.

Mr. Forstmann bought the painting in 2001 from the Acquavella Galleries in New York.

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

At the Nasher museum in Dallas, Rodin’s “Age of Bronze” sits in dappled light as glare streams through a patterned screen.

May 1, 2012

By ROBIN POGREBIN

DALLAS — Two things were supposed to happen when the Nasher Sculpture Center opened here in 2003. Famous works like Rodin’s “Age of Bronze” and Matisse’s “Madeleine I” were to be bathed in copious sunlight streaming through a glass roof. And new vigor was to come to the surrounding neighborhood.

The results exceeded expectations. And Dallas has a mess on its hands.

The center, designed by Renzo Piano and Peter Walker, was considered so appealing that a 42-story condominium called Museum Tower sprouted across the street. But the glass skin of the condo tower, still under construction, now reflects so much light that it is threatening artworks in the galleries, burning the plants in the center’s garden and blinding visitors with its glare.

No one quite knows what to do. The condo developer and museum officials are at loggerheads. Fingers are being pointed. Mr. Piano is furious. The developer’s architect is aggrieved. The mayor is involved. A former official in the George W. Bush administration has been asked to mediate.

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Glare from a condo tower is a problem for a nearby museum.

The situation has been characterized by some here as a David-and-Goliath battle between a beloved nonprofit and commercial interests. But the dispute has also raised the broader question of what can happen when, as is currently the rage, cultural institutions are cast as engines of economic development.

The Nasher was seen as an important spur to the renaissance of downtown Dallas, much the way Lincoln Center was viewed as something of a cure for urban blight on the West Side of Manhattan. But the forces unleashed in these situations can prompt a distinctly uneasy relationship between cultural organizations and the neighborhood changes they attract.

“These things start to bump into each other,” said the mayor of Dallas, Mike Rawlings. “How we as a civic society power through this is an important moment for us. You’ve got a high-growth engine that is trying to do right by Giacometti.”

Dallas’s interest in raising its cultural profile is palpable here: the city has been building its arts district over the last 20 years; Saturday Cowboys Stadium hosted a simulcast of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” by the Dallas Opera. The Nasher problem has the whole city concerned and watching.

“Typically, neighborhood disputes are not this dramatic — an offending sign or a barking dog,” said Veletta Forsythe Lill, the executive director of the Dallas Arts District. “This is a cultural, civic and commercial tragedy. The Nasher is a kind of a masterpiece, and the building and the garden were perfectly designed.”

Mr. Piano said he designed the Nasher with natural light in mind. The museum has an arched glass roof with a perforated aluminum screen in an egg-crate pattern that directs the sun into the galleries, which were laid out in anticipation of the sun’s daily arc from southeast to southwest.

Now, sun, magnified by reflection, shines into the galleries from the north and raises the temperature in the sculpture garden — designed by Mr. Walker — to levels that jeopardize the specially planted live oak trees and grass.

“By doing this, they destroy completely the logic of the building,” Mr. Piano said in an interview.

For the museumgoer, the sculptures in the galleries and the garden can be obscured or distorted by distracting light patterns or glare. The museum was forced to install light-blocking panels inside the roof for a recent exhibition of works by Elliott Hundley because the reflections from the tower exceeded the acceptable light levels for the art.

Scott Johnson, the Los Angeles architect who designed Museum Tower, said he was willing to consider remedies but that the Nasher also had to be open-minded. “My responsibility is to fully vet solutions vis-à-vis Museum Tower — that’s my building,” he said. “But I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.”

Museum Tower’s owners said in a statement, “All parties desire resolution to these issues as quickly as possible.”

Glare problems, of course, can cut both ways. In Los Angeles a few years ago, the architect Frank Gehry had to sandblast portions of his stainless-steel-clad Disney Concert Hall because the reflected sunlight was creating problems for residents in a nearby apartment building.

Mr. Piano, for his part, said it would be “impossible” for the museum building to make adjustments to offset the glare.

“What do you do — put a roof on the garden? You destroy everything,” he said. “They must solve the problem because they created the problem.”

Architecture experts say the owners of Museum Tower could cover its glass facade with a solar shading system that cuts the glare, at potentially considerable expense.

A regulation that set a strict limit on the reflectivity of buildings on the site expired in 2008 and was revised with more lenient restrictions, though the tower’s opponents say the building still exceeds them. Mr. Johnson said that he learned of such rules only recently through the local news media and that he hoped the conflict “ignites a larger conversation about urban communities and neighbors.”

Not everyone here, of course, views the dispute as a cataclysm. Writing in The Dallas Observer last month, the columnist Jim Schutze made light of it.

“Nothing takes our minds off this misery we call middle-class survival in America like a rich kids art fight,” he wrote. “It’s like our own little hometown Brangelina.”

Since the building that overlooks the sculpture center and its garden is using the Nasher as a selling point — prices stretch into the millions — those involved say its owners should want to keep the Nasher healthy.

“By doing this, they kill what they use to sell it,” Mr. Piano said.

The Dallas Arts District — which now includes the AT&T , Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center and the Dallas Museum of Art — always also hoped to attract commercial projects.

“I want Museum Tower to be very successful — I want people living in that building and loving to live in that building,” said Deedie Rose, a Dallas arts philanthropist who was active in establishing the arts district. “But the Nasher has to be protected.”

The sculpture center was created by Raymond D. Nasher, a real estate developer and banker who, along with his wife, Patsy, amassed one of the world’s leading collections of Modern and contemporary sculpture. Although several cities courted the collection, Mr. Nasher, who died in 2007, decided to build and personally finance the $70 million center in Dallas, where he made his fortune.

“He gave a tremendous gift to the city,” Mayor Rawlings said, “a gift we’ve got to be good stewards of.”

Complicating matters is that the $200 million Museum Tower is owned by the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, on whose board sit four members of the City Council.

Mayor Rawlings stepped in after the two sides failed to come to terms on their own. He appointed a “facilitator,” Tom Luce, a prominent local lawyer who served under President George W. Bush as an assistant secretary of education. The first meeting with Mr. Luce is this month.

Construction of the tower continues. And the Nasher had to remove Picasso’s “Nude Man and Woman,” an oil on canvas, to get it out of dangerous direct sunlight. (The artist James Turrell also insisted that the Nasher shut down his installation “Tending, (Blue)” because its roof aperture was meant to reveal open sky, not a skyscraper.)

Vel Hawes, a Dallas architect who served as Mr. Nasher’s representative for the design and construction of the museum, said the founder would not be happy. “I assure you,” Mr. Hawes said, “he’s not resting easy in his grave right now.”

By LEE ROSENBAUMUniversity of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim

"Mural" (1943) by Jackson Pollock

Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock
Hood Museum of Art
Through Jun 17
Then travels to the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.

Hanover, N.H.

The late Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was a tough act to follow. Probably because no one can top his definitive 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective, we have no major show in the U.S. this year to commemorate the centenary of that towering Abstract Expressionist's birth.

But there are aspects of Pollock's work from the years preceding the famous "drip" paintings that remain underexplored. Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art, under its new director, Michael Taylor (former curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), has seized the moment by hastily assembling an absorbing dossier exhibition focusing on a crucial period in Pollock's trajectory from representational landscapes, heavily influenced by his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, to his signature abstract masterpieces that, according to popular and Hollywood legend, seemed to spring out of nowhere.

The Hood's "Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock," organized by Sarah Powers of the Hood with Pollock expert Helen Harrison, reveals that many of the pictorial strategies employed by Pollock in his celebrated monumental canvases of the late 1940s to early 1950s can be traced to his intensely charged easel-size paintings from the brief period, 1938-41, when this quintessentially American artist was haunted by Orozco's macabre visions of skeletons and ritual sacrifice. Pollock had seen the Mexican's murals in 1930 at Pomona College in California and, six years later, at Dartmouth. While there are plenty of pyrotechnics in the works of both artists, "Men of Fire" might have been more aptly (if less appealingly) titled "Men of Skulls and Bones."

Pollock owed his enthusiasm for the visceral impact of monumentality to Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and, above all, Orozco. In his first oversize horizontal canvas, a 20-foot-wide 1943 composition, "Mural," commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim (on view at the Des Moines Art Center through July 15), Pollock was influenced not only by Orozco's larger-than-life scale but also by the swirling energy of his brushstrokes and dramatic use of black to define curving contours. Orozco's archetypal images of snakes, skulls and flames, which must have resonated with the American's Jungian sensibility, are abundantly present in Pollock's works at the Hood.

Gallery: 'Men of Fire'

View Slideshow

2012 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. .

'Untitled (Bald Woman and Skeleton)' by Jackson Pollock

To appreciate "Men of Fire," you need to start not in Dartmouth's art museum but in its Baker Library. That's where the 24-year-old Pollock made pilgrimage in 1936 to see Orozco's 24-panel mural "The Epic of American Civilization" (1932-34), a sweeping history of the Mexican people. Its darkly symbolic and ritualistic content made a strong impression on the younger artist. Dartmouth also owns Orozco's studies for the mural, included in the Hood's show.

Nowhere is the connection between Dartmouth's mural and Pollock's work clearer than in his "Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton)" (c. 1938-41), acquired by the Hood six years ago. With a lumpish, crouched female at its center, it quotes the image of a skeletal ribcage and extended limb from Orozco's fiercely satiric panel "Gods of the Modern World." That work had stirred an uproar at Dartmouth over its depiction of a ghoulish cadre of skeletal professors in caps and gowns, overseeing a female skeleton as she gives birth to a skeletal baby with a mortarboard on its head (representing "stillborn knowledge").

Like many of the Pollocks in the show, "Bald Woman" is densely composed and difficult to read. Only close scrutiny can unpack the contorted anatomy of the drooping woman and the many images derived from Orozco's mural—winding serpents, orange flames and the jumble of tiny, sickly green skulls surrounding the central figure. Pollock had transmuted Orozco's politically charged imagery into psychological totems. The morbid scene is redolent with death and despair.

Pollock's use of semiabstraction and his partial concealment of representational images point ahead to the layered complexities of the drip paintings, where representation seems to disappear. The Museum of Modern Art's "Flame" (c. 1934-38), for example, is a precursor to all-over abstraction, with its jagged orange, black and white slashes that represent a raging fire. Without help from the label text, you might miss the ribcage—parallel light and dark lines. Lying near the bottom of the canvas, amid the conflagration, the bones suggest that this is a sacrificial pyre.

Pollock's use of disguised and obscured representation, although later difficult to detect, persisted into his abstract masterpieces of the late '40s and early '50s. As noted in the catalog for MoMA's show, close analysis of Pollock's signature "drip" paintings (informed by Hans Namuth's famous images of Pollock at work) reveals their structural underpinnings of veiled and hidden figures.

The link between the proto-Pollocks seen at Dartmouth and the mature abstract masterpieces is the groundbreaking, ex-Peggy Guggenheim "Mural" of 1943. Designed for her apartment's entrance hall, that dazzling achievement, said to have been largely executed in one day, is not only the first but also the biggest of the mural-size Pollocks.

A frenzy of black verticals and whorls, enlivened with touches of pink, yellow and turquoise, "Mural," under sustained scrutiny, comes into focus as a cross-canvas parade of upright, abstracted figures, with outlines strongly reminiscent of the black-defined curves of the marching Aztecs' muscled flesh in the "Migration" panel that begins Dartmouth's Orozco mural. Tightly focused on the brief period when Pollock was most strongly influenced by Orozco, the show doesn't include (or illustrate) works like "Mural" that marked the next step toward Pollocks signature style. But the black swirls that animate Orozco's and Pollock's murals also figure prominently in a painting displayed at the entrance to the Hood's show, the Tate Gallery's powerful "Naked Man with Knife" (c. 1938-1940), a chaotic jumble of three fiercely grappling nudes.

Comparing the little-known Pollocks at the Hood with the paintings that later became touchstones of international veneration reveals that we might not have had the latter without the foundation laid by the former. Contradicting the myth of the sudden epiphany, Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, once noted that there were "no sharp breaks" from the works of the pre-"drip" period to the mature masterpieces, "but rather a continuing development of the same themes and obsessions."

You can see the truth of that in Hanover.

Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ARTIST Picasso

TITLE 'Femme Assise Dans un Fauteuil'

AUCTION HOUSE Sotheby's

ESTIMATE $20 million to $30 million

Estate property is especially desirable in part because it has generally been off the market for years and comes with reasonable estimates. This canvas, from 1941, is one of 17 works being sold on Wednesday from the estate of Theodore J. Forstmann, the New York financier who died in November. Painted in the early years of World War II, the distorted figure of Dora Maar, Picasso’s muse and lover, posed in a chair is one of scores of seated women whom he depicted. “The anguish of the war and his relationship with Dora, which was deteriorating, is reflected in these paintings,” said John Richardson, the Picasso biographer. “He painted Dora in such an angular way, she almost looks like a pair of scissors.”

The painting was made the same year as Picasso’s “Dora Maar With Cat,” a far more dramatic canvas with a black cat perched on Maar’s shoulder that sold for $95.2 million at Sotheby’s in 2006.

Mr. Forstmann bought the painting in 2001 from the Acquavella Galleries in New York.