Break out the checkbooks, art aficionados — because there’s a Pablo Picasso masterpiece coming to the Big Apple that will soon hit the auction block for an estimated $140 million.
Christie’s auction house has announced that they will be offering up an anonymous seller’s 1955 “Women of Algiers (Version O)” for what could possibly become the highest price tag ever placed on a piece of auctioned art.
The current record was set in 2013, when Francis Bacon’s triptych “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” sold for a whopping $142.4 million. Christie’s had originally set a starting price of $85 million before casino developer Elaine Wynn eventually made her winning bid.
Picasso’s “Women of Algiers” is a vibrantly colorful and charismatic painting that features several scantily clad women. It was part of a 15-work series created by the influential Spanish artist between 1954 and 1955.
The piece will be auctioned off with a group of two dozen other major 20th century works as part of a stand-alone sale called “Looking Forward to the Past.”
Christie’s said that the collector had acquired the Picasso piece at the New York auction house in 1997 for $31.9 million.
With Post wires