Bloomberg | 2013-11-6

China’s richest man, Wang Jianlin, bought Picasso’s painting of his young children, Claude and Paloma, for $28.2 million at Christie’s in New York yesterday, the auction house said.

Estimated at $9 million to $12 million, the 1950 canvas led an otherwise lackluster evening sale of art dealer Jan Krugier’s collection.

The sale took in $92.5 million. Coupled with $21.2 million from today’s morning session, the two-part auction tallied $113.7 million, 34 percent below the low end of its presale estimate range of $171.4 million to $244.3 million. Of the 155 offered lots, 29 failed to find buyers, including pieces by Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Gerhard Richter and Robert Rauschenberg.

Wang, who bought Picasso’s “Claude et Paloma,” through Rebecca Wei, managing director of Christie’s Asia, ranks 84th on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index with net worth of $13.2 billion. He is the chairman and founder of Dalian Wanda, a Chinese conglomerate with interests in commercial property development, a department-store chain, tourism, hotels and entertainment centers.