A Pablo Picasso painting from 1937 that has been held in a private collection for more than three decades will be offered at Bonhams in an Impressionist and modern art auction in New York on May 13. Titled Femme au béret mauve, the work is scheduled to go on view in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, and Hong Kong before coming to its final location at the house’s New York headquarters. It is expected to fetch a price of $10 million–$15 million.

The painting depicts Picasso’s muse Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom the artist maintained a relationship alongside photographer Dora Maar, to whom he was still married at the time. The work was made in Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, France in the year following the start of the Spanish Civil War, during this period that Picasso also painted his famed Guernica, housed at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and Weeping Woman, a portrait of Maar now owned by Tate Modern in London.

“This bright, joyous portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter exudes stability and calm at a time when Picasso’s personal life was in turmoil and all of Europe was living under the shadow of impending war,” Molly Ott Amber, Bonhams senior vice president and head of impressionist, modern, European and American Art, said in a statement. “Family life with Marie-Thérèse and their daughter Maya represented a refuge of serenity and sensuality so wonderfully captured in this work.”

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Sotheby’s has secured the vast collection of Texas heiress Anne Marion, who died last February at the age of 81. The collection, which is rich in work by American postwar artists like Andy Warhol, Clyfford Still, and Roy Lichtenstein, is expected to fetch a collective $150 million when it sells at auction in New York this spring. It will be sold across eight sales of work in various categories, including 20th century art, Old Masters, American art, and jewelry.

A fourth-generation heiress to the Four Sixes Ranch and the Burnett Oil company, founded by her great grandfather Samuel Burnett, Marion went on to expand her family’s ranching and oil empire, amassing a net worth of $1.1 billion that made her one of the country’s top arts patrons.

Many of the works in the Marion estate have been out of the public eye since the 1970s and 1980s, when she first began acquiring art. Among the top works to be sold are Warhol’s 1963 silver silkscreen painting Elvis 2 Times, featuring a double image of the rock ’n’ roll icon sourced from a 1960s movie still, an homage to Marion’s ranching roots. A similar work resides at the Whitney Museum, a gift from Leonard Lauder. Marion’s Elvis is expected to sell for $20 million–$30 million.

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For its first New York sale of 2021, Phillips’s live “New Now” auction will feature 188 works by in-demand emerging artists such as Matthew Wong, Joy Labinjo, Lucas Arruda, Eric Parker, and Vaughn Spann. Scheduled to take place March 3, the sale is expected to fetch $3.8 million.

Headlining the mid-season contemporary art sale is Wong’s Lotus (2017), an orange and blue landscape that is estimated to reach $600,000. The late painter’s market remains strong following his auction debut at Sotheby’s in June, and has seen continuously escalating auction prices, particularly for his oneiric landscapes. His 2018 landscape Coming of Age sold at Christie’s this past December for $1.6 million, three times its low estimate of $500,000.

Phillips, which is known for its focus on rising talents, will offer works by artists who have yet to be seen at auction in the “New Now” sale this March. Those making their secondary-market debut include Jan-Ole Schiemann, Nikki Maloof, Brandon Landers, Raúl de Nieves, and Allison Zuckerman.

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On Tuesday, Philadelphia-based auction house Freeman’s sold Viennese artist Carl Moll’s White Interior (1905) for a record-breaking $4.75 million during its European art and Old Masters sale, which brought in a collective $6.4 million.

The result for the Moll painting marks the highest price achieved for a single lot in the house’s history, surpassing the $3.1 million paid for a Chinese vase in 2011, and Tuesday’s sale is now the biggest auction ever held at Freeman’s. White Interior also bested Moll’s previous record of $385,700, paid for a landscape by the artist at Austrian auction house Dorotheum in 2007.

The record-setting painting, which depicts art critic Berta Zuckerkandl-Szeps in her Döbling apartment in an all-white palette, surfaced on the market after more than a century of being held privately. It came from a German family collection, having passed through inheritance to the California-based heir of the original owners, where it has been since the 1970s, and it is the only figurative Moll painting ever sold at auction.

“Everyone thought it was lost, because it was only known through a black and white photograph from a show in 1905,” said Freeman’s European art and Old Masters specialist Raphaël Chatroux. “But in fact, we believe the work was bought directly by the family of our consignor. We don’t know if it was bought directly from the artist by them, but we think that it is highly possible it was bought right after it was shown in Vienna in 1908, because otherwise the artist would have continued to exhibit it.”

The painting was first exhibited in Berlin in 1905 and later at the Museum Folkwang in Essen the following year. It had last been shown publicly at Vienna’s Kunstschau in 1908, alongside Gustav Klimt’s iconic The Kiss (which is now held by the Belvedere Museum in Vienna).

Moll was one of the founding members of the Vienna Secession movement. With a market concentrated mainly in Europe, he is known for his idyllic domestic scenes. Moll, who supported Nazism, committed suicide in Vienna upon Germany’s defeat in 1945.

Part of White Interior‘s success owes to its subject—another Moll portrait of Zuckerkandl-Szeps is held in a private collection. According to Chatroux, Zuckerkandl-Szeps played a diplomatic role in maintaining artistic ties between French and Austrian artists during World War I. By World War II, the Jewish intellectual fled to Paris, then to the Maghreb (Northwest Africa). “She was very known for her modern and bold views because she used to write in newspapers to defend artists of the avant-garde,” said Chatroux. “She was a big Klimt supporter, especially when he was painting nudes that were considered a bit too realistic and graphic.”

After a protracted bidding period that lasted just under 10 minutes and involved a dozen parties, an American collector won the work. Following the sale, the auction house reported that the anonymous buyer was planning to exhibit the work at New York’s Neue Galerie, which houses the formidable German and Viennese art collection of New York investor Ronald Lauder. The Neue Galerie did not respond to a request for comment.

Christie’s is making a move into the emerging crypto art market with plans to offer a fully-digital work of art, making it the first major auction house to offer a piece of this kind for sale.

The work, known as an NFT (Non-Fungible Token), is by Beeple (né Mike Winkelmann), a net artist and graphic designer who has amassed a large following on social media producing commercial projects for pop stars and brands like Louis Vuitton and Nike. A Christie’s representative called him “a leader in the digital art community.”

The work selling at Christie’s, titled Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021), is a digital collage consisting of 5,000 images, one made each day over the course of 13 years, from 2007 to 2021. Unlike most works, which come to sale with a predetermined estimate, Everydays does not have a price range. Bidding will begin at $100 in an online auction that runs from February 25–March 11.

The unique edition from Beeple’s Everdays series is comprised of drawings responding to current events, incorporating surreal scenes of politicians like Donald Trump and Mao Zedung and cartoons featuring Pokemon and Mickey Mouse.

Christie’s is not the first to auction an NFT work by Beeple, whose collection of 21 original works from his Everydays project generated $3.5 million in December in an auction with crypto art platform Nifty Gateway.

Crypto art relies on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the transaction and ownership record of which are encrypted and unable to be duplicated. The present work exists as an encrypted file, and its purchase at the end of Christie’s auction will be registered on the blockchain.

Christie’s has taken an interest in digital technologies, both on the block and behind the scenes. In October, the house sold a piece from Robert Alice’s 2020 painting series “Portraits of a Mind” that incorporates Bitcoin code into its composition. And in 2018, the house collaborated with blockchain-backed art registry service Artory to host the sale of Barney A. Ebsworth’s American art collection.

Through these tech-based initiatives, Christie’s is gauging existing and potential clients’ interest in the nascent market for digital works and blockchain-backed art buying.

“There has been an understanding that the blockchain was going to inevitably play a role in the art business,” said Noah Davis, a Christie’s specialist in post-war and contemporary art in charge of the Beeple sale. “We’re still at the very infancy of how this technology is going to impact the art world.”

For Christie’s, the move into the market for NFT works signals a possible push to attract a new generation of clients who fall outside the traditional fine art collection realm. For the present work, such an audience, Davis said, “skews younger, more in the millennial range” and is “definitely male and more American than not.”

Christie’s, the leading auction house by market share, is not known for its forays in experimenting with emerging markets. But with the current sale, the house seems to be changing course.

“We’re at this moment in time where there could be a drastic shift— a demographic shift, a generational shift— when it comes to what excites younger collectors,” said Davis. “Christie’s as an organization is really excited about a moment in time where you see $3.5 million of sales just organically appear out of thin air. That’s something we want to capitalize on.”