MET Museum sells Picasso sculpture for $30 million

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is selling a valuable bronze casting of the head of a woman by Pablo Picasso, dated 1909, at Christie's auction in May this year, Artnews.

The museum said it was rejecting the early work, which is the first sculpture ever created by the artist in his Cubist style and has been in the collection for more than two decades, because it owns another version of the same work that was recently donated by Leonard Lauder, one of the world's largest collectors of Cubist art.

According to a Christie's representative, the cost of the work is estimated on request and is expected to be about $ 30 million. It will be sold during the evening sale of twentieth-century art in New York; the exact date of the auction has not yet been announced.

Picasso made about 16 bronze casts of the painting, which depicts the French artist and model Fernande Olivier. In a statement, Mark Porter, chairman of the board of Christie's Americas, called this work a "rare example" of how the artist's work enters the secondary market, saying that it represents "an absolutely decisive moment in the development of the artistic practice of Picasso, Cubism, and the art canon in general."

The bronze sculpture entered the museum's collection in 1995, when it was donated from the estate of Florena M. Schoenborn, a lifelong trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. The double cast of the "Woman's Head" (Fernanda), which the museum decided to keep, was provided by Lauder, the current trustee of the Metro, who promised the Metro 78 works from his collection of Cubist art in 2013.