Previously unknown Picasso portrait revealed in Paris

Employees unveil a painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso titled “Bust of a woman with a flowery hat,” during its presentation at Hôtel Drouot auction house on September 18, 2025. STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP

A previously unknown portrait by Pablo Picasso of one of his lovers was revealed on Thursday, September 18, after being put up for sale at auction in Paris with a reserve price of €8 million ($9.5 million). Entitled Bust of a woman with a flowery hat, it depicts Dora Maar, a French photographer, painter and poet who was Picasso’s best-known muse. It was painted by Picasso on July 11, 1943, and acquired in August 1944 by a French collector, who was the grandfather of the current owners.

Painted with oil, the colourful work measuring 80 x 60 centimeters “is valued at around €8 million, a reserve price that could soar,” according to auctioneer Christophe Lucien at the Parisian auction house Hôtel Drouot. The sellers are divesting the painting as part of an inheritance settlement, Lucien said.

The painting depicts Maar with a melancholy but harmonious face, wearing a colorful, flowery hat, at a moment when the macho Spanish painter was abandoning her for a younger artist, Françoise Gilot.

Maar was Picasso’s most important model and muse, with some 60 works based around her. His The Weeping Woman portraits depict her and they collaborated on his masterpiece Guernica, with Maar photographing the black and white anti-war work and Picasso using her images to develop the canvas. Other famed cubist renderings of her include Portrait of Dora Maar and Bust of a Woman.

Their tumultuous nine-year affair, which they almost entirely conducted in Spanish, began in 1936, and is credited by some with helping Picasso rekindle his creative spark. Their messy break-up, however, saw Maar plunge into depression.

A major show at Paris’s Pompidou Center and London’s Tate Modern gallery in 2019 sought to spotlight Maar’s own creative talent and drag her out from Picasso’s considerable shadow.

‘A milestone in the history of art’

Agnès Sevestre-Barbé, a Picasso specialist who was present during the unveiling of the work, said it was “unknown to the public and never exhibited, except in the Spanish master’s studio in Paris.” She added that it was “quite exceptional and marks a milestone in the history of art and in that of Picasso.”

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Picasso sales are used as a leading indicator for the art market as a whole, which has slumped in recent years. Sales totaled $223 million in 2024, around a third of the $597 million spent on the Spanish master the previous year, auction data from the consultancy Artprice showed in March. This year, Picasso’s Homme assis, a painting of a seated musketeer from 1969, sold for $15.1 million, at Sotheby’s in New York, on May 13.

The record sale for one of his works was The Women of Algiers, a 1955 oil painting which sold for $179.4 million at Christie’s in New York, in 2015.

Le Monde with AFP