Sotheby’s will offer Pablo Picasso’s seminal early cubist portrait “Femme assise” 1909, one of the artist’s most important cubist works, during its June 21 Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London.Picasso painted “Femme assise” in 1909 during the months that he spent in the remote Catalonian village of Horta de Ebro (now Horta de Sant Joan) with his lover Fernande Olivier, who was the inspiration for the portrait.According to Sotheby’s, the months that Picasso spent in Horta proved to be one of the most significant periods of his career – a period during which he a radically new approach to the representation of form.Commenting on the work, Helena Newman, the global co-head of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art department, told the Art Newspaper. “It is several decades since a Cubist painting of this caliber has been offered at auction, since virtually all the significant works of this period are in international museums and institutions.”“[Femme assise] is one of the artist’s greatest masterpieces to be sold in a generation,” she added.The painting will be displayed at Sotheby’s New York from May 16-18, at Sotheby’s Hong Kong from May 26-30, and then at Sotheby’s London from June 10-21.
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