Picasso Painting of Muse Dora Maar Comes to Auction for the First Time
By GEOFF NUDELMAN
Tue, Apr 30, 2024 9:30am
2 min
2 min
A portrait by Pablo Picasso of his lover and muse Dora Maar will be sold at auction for the first time at a Phillips evening sale in May in New York and is estimated to realize as much as US$18 million.
Buste de femme au chapeau, 1939, depicts Maar, whom Picasso met in 1935 and remained with for a decade. Buste de femme remained in Picasso’s personal collection until he died in 1973, when Galerie Beyeler in Switzerland took ownership of the piece and kept it alongside other works from the artist’s Femmes au chapeau series, according to Phillips.
The piece has been in the same collection for the last 30 years, according to Jean-Paul Engelen, president, Americas, and worldwide co-head of modern and contemporary art for Phillips.
According to Phillips, the painting, only 24 inches by 15 inches, employs techniques from Cubism, and contains elements familiar to Picasso’s paintings of Marr, “including his distinctive rendering of her eyes, strong line of her nose, and radical combinations of frontal and profile views.”
Phillips
Phillips’ modern and contemporary evening sale on May 14 will also include three previously announced works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, including a large painting from the early 1980s, Untitled (ELMAR) , 1982, that could sell for more than US$60 million.
Phillips
Also in the sale is Barclay L. Hendricks’ 1977 work, Vendetta, with an estimate between US$2.5 million and US$3.5 million. The painting was featured in the artist’s first career retrospective, and toured across the U.S. from 2008 to 2009. Hendricks’ works rarely come to auction, and Engelen expects increased interest given a recent exhibition of the artist’s works at the Frick Collection in New York.
Phillips
Lastly, two sculpture “stacks” from Donald Judd will be sold. A 1978 set in stainless steel and yellow fluorescent Plexiglas, described as a “signature” piece by the artist completed when he was near the top of his career, is estimated to sell for between US$5.5 million and US$7.5 million. The second is a 1994 six-part set composed of Cor-ten steel and black Plexiglas finished just before the artist’s death early that year. It carries an estimate of US$2 million to US$3 million.
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The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.
By Micah Maidenberg
Mon, Mar 30, 2026 4 min
4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
