A painting hidden for nearly a century just fetched $37 million in Paris—and it’s raising far darker questions than anyone in the art world wants to answer.
A Lost Picasso That Should’ve Been Impossible to Find
Pablo Picasso’s “Bust of a Woman with a Flowered Hat (Dora Maar)” surfaced from obscurity after 80 years. The portrait of his muse Dora Maar was painted in 1943 while Nazi troops still occupied Paris. At the October 24 auction, the once-forgotten masterpiece sold for an eye-popping $37 million—almost four times its estimated price of $9.5 million.
Auctioneer Christophe Lucien declared the sale “an enormous success” and celebrated it as France’s most expensive art sale of 2025. The painting had been tucked away in a family collection since 1944 and was known only from a single black-and-white photo snapped in Picasso’s studio. It had never been displayed publicly—not once in eight decades.
Art specialist Agnès Sevestre-Barbé marveled at its untouched condition, saying, “We have a painting that is exactly as it was when it left the studio. It wasn’t varnished, which means we have all its raw material, all of it.”
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