Hong Kong — A rare Picasso painting, on auction for the first time, made its debut in Hong Kong at the start of a global tour on Tuesday and is expected to fetch $50m, auction house Sotheby’s said. The painting — Femme au béret et à la robe quadrillée (Woman in beret and checked dress) (Marie-Thérèse Walter) — is a colourful and angular depiction of Picasso’s French lover with a dark silhouette looming behind her face. "Of all of the artist’s styles and decades, this is the one that most epitomises the legacy of Picasso as a portraitist of women," said Thomas Bompard of the Impressionist and Modern Art department at Sotheby’s in London. Walter began her relationship with Picasso as his mistress and muse when she was 17; she committed suicide in 1977, four years after Picasso’s death. Picasso painted the portrait a few months after his masterpiece Guernica was conceived in 1937 in the depths of Spain’s devastating civil war. The portrait is said to explore Picasso’s evolving relation...
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