08 March,2011 07:57 AM IST | | Agencies
The most expensive painting to be sold at auction, Pablo Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (see pic), went on public display in Britain for the first time yesterday at the Tate Modern gallery in London.
The 1932 work, which sold for $106.5 million at Christie's in New York last year, has been lent to the Tate galleries from a private collection and will be on display in a new Pablo Picasso room in the Poetry and Dream section.
"Nude, Green Leaves and Bust is one of the sequence of paintings of Picasso's muse, Marie-Therese Walter, made by the artist at Boisgeloup, Normandy, in the early months of 1932," said Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director.
Although Picasso had long disguised his affair with Walter, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was among the works which openly charted the lovers' obsession with each other.
