Picasso work sells for $179M setting world auction record

Twenty minutes in its Evening Sale at Christie’s Rockefeller Center Monday, the gavel dropped on a new world auction record for the most valuable work of art sold at auction. Pablo Picasso’s 1955 masterpiece Les femmes d’Alger, Version O sold for $179,365,000 (including buyer’s premium) after 11 and ½ minutes of bidding to a client on the phone with Brett Gorvy, International Head, Post-War and Contemporary Art. Several clients chased the work from its starting bid of $100 million, trading at least 30 bids in increments of $1 million until it reached its final hammer price of $160 million.