Ever heard of the ‘Femme Assise, Robe Bleu’, or ‘Seated Woman in Blue Dress’?

Unless you’re an art fundi then probably not, but it’s one of Picasso’s most famous paintings and it’s worth a heck of a lot of money.

Sold on auction yesterday at Christie’s in New York, the painting, which features lover Dora Maar, fetched $45 million (R590 million).

The BBC reports:

During World War Two, the Nazis seized the painting but were intercepted on their way from Paris to Moravia by French Resistance fighters…

Dora Maar and Picasso had an intense relationship for nine years. He painted Seated Woman in 1939, when he was 58 and she was 31.

It is one of the great Picasso portraits of his middle years, inspired – as so often – by love and by powerful sexual desire.

Picasso, you dirty SOB.

More from the Telegraph:

The painting, which had passed through the hands of eminent art dealer and collector Ernst Beyeler in the Sixties, had been sold in 2011 to the Geneva-based collector Dimitri Mavromatis for £18 million [R304 million].

Given that Dimitri banked R286 million off the painting in just six years, perhaps these guys are on to something.

By the by, in May 2015 Picasso’s ‘Les femmes d’Alger’ became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction when it fetched $179 million (R2,34 billion).

[sources:bbc&telegraph]