Powerful depiction of Picasso's Femme au beret et a la robe quadrillee (Marie-Therese Walter), is exhibited in Hong Kong on Tuesday before it travels on, with a value of about 50 million U.S. dollars.
The painting will be offered for the first time as a star lot of Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London on February 28.
James Mackie, head of the Impressionist & Modern Art Department in London, said this work, completed in December 1937 and painted just months after Guernica and The Weeping Woman, emerges onto the market for the first time.
In the painting, a woman wears a beret and a red checkered dress. The work's sharp cubistic edges, thick impastoed paint and black outlines give it an immediate visual impact -- the emphatic execution and bold palette packed with emotional charge.
A painting of heightened psychological intensity, the work brings to a climax of a turbulent and highly charged year in Picasso's life.
