Sold for: $115 million

The sale of Peggy and David Rockefeller’s art collection at Christie’s New York, which included top lots by Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, and Claude Monet, set a historic high for a single-owner sale in 2018. The piece that fetched the highest price was Picasso’s portrait Fillette a la corbeille fleurie, made during the artist’s Rose Period.

The work’s first owners were Leo and Gertrude Stein, the American siblings and early patrons of modern art, who bought it from a Paris dealer the year it was completed. After Gertrude Stein’s death, the painting was passed to her companion, Alice B. Toklas, whose estate sold it in 1968 to a syndicate of collectors associated with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. David Rockefeller then purchased it for himself.

When the painting sold for a staggering $115 million during the blockbuster Rockefeller auction in 2018, its price wasn’t the only reason the piece attracted attention. Featuring a nude prepubescent girl, wearing only a necklace and holding a basket of red flowers, the work generated controversy over Picasso’s sexualized image of a child, known among historians to be an underage flower seller and sex worker named Linda.

The work has long been considered a masterpiece, though. “She represents the themes that Picasso would wrestle with for his life—love, sex, beauty, tenderness, violence,” said Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas. Since the record sale of the work, criticism among scholars surrounding Picasso’s treatment of women has persisted. In 2021, protesters staged a demonstration outside Barcelona’s Picasso Museum in an attempt to bring attention to the issue.