Edvard Munch’s ‘Girls on the Bridge’ Could Fetch $50m at Sotheby’s

A work by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch will highlight Sotheby’s fall auction of impressionist and modern art.

The auction house expects the painting ‘Girls on the Bridge’ to sell for more than $50 million on November 14, The China Post reported.

The seminal work from 1902 depicts a cluster of girls huddled on the bridge of a country village. It was sold in 1996 for $7.7 million and again in 2008 for $30.8 million, each time setting a record for the artist.

In 2012, Munch’s famous work ‘The Scream’, one of the most iconic images in art history, sold for $119.9 million at Sotheby’s. It became the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, a record that has been broken four times since.

Pablo Picasso’s ‘Women of Algiers (Version O)’ now holds that distinction. It sold last year for $179.4 million.

Other works in the November evening sale include a large-scale painting by Picasso, ‘The Painter and His Model,’ from 1963. It carries a presale estimate of $12 to $18 million.

A 1951 bronze bust by Picasso of his muse Francoise Gilot is also on tap. ‘Head of a Woman’ could fetch $6 to $8 million.

An early cubist composition by Mexican artist Diego Rivera, ‘Untitled (Cubist Composition)’, from 1916 is estimated to bring $500,000 to $700,000.

The sale also has two abstract works by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy that recently appeared in a retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The 1923 work, ‘EM 1 Telephonbild’, has a presale estimate of $3 to $4 million.