On Monday night, Picasso’s Les Femmes D’Alger (“Women of Algiers”) became the most expensive painting ever to sell at auction. It sold for $179.3 million at Christie’s New York, almost five times its 1997 sale price—$31.9 million. The previous record was held by Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which sold for $142.4 million in 2013.
