Pablo Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves And Bust – the most expensive painting ever to be sold at auction – will be featured in the Tate Modern’s newly formed “Picasso Room” for the next two years.
It’s the first time this masterpiece has ever been publically displayed in the United Kingdom.
Sold for £66m at Cristie’s in New York City to a mystery bidder last May, the seminal work was previously hoarded by last owners Sidney and Frances Brody, private collectors who only publically displayed the painting once in 1961 in honour of Picasso’s 80th birthday.
The painting was created in a single day in 1932 during the height of Picasso’s extramarital affair with a young Marie-Therese Walter.
The two met in 1927 when the Spanish painter – overtaken by Walter’s beauty after seeing her leave a Paris metro station – grabbed the 17-year-old’s arm and announced: “I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together.”
The cubist painting depicts a nude Walter lying beneath a bust, framed by green leaves.
It is one of a series of Picassos that show the painter’s mistress in sexually submissive positions before the two broke up in 1935, when Picasso took a new mistress, Dora Maar.
The Tate’s director, Sir Nicholas Serota, said of the painting: “This is an outstanding painting by Picasso and I am delighted that through the generosity of the lender we are able to bring it to the British public for the first time.”
Serota added that the series of Walter paintings were “widely regarded as amongst his greatest achievements of the interwar period”.