Picasso and Giacometti Might Smash World Records At NYC's Spring Auction

This time, Christie's New York spring auction house is expecting to roll out a major new world record. It has put up Picasso's value at $140 million and Giacometti at $130 million, according to yahoonews.com.

Pablo Picasso's colorful "The Women of Algiers (Version 0)," that shows a scene from a harem, will be on the auction block. Alberto Giacometti's bronze statue "Man Pointing," which is a cast with just six replicas in the world, will also be up for auction.

"Those two works can set a world record," said Loic Gouzer, senior vice president of Christie's. "You don't have another chance to get them."

The evening sale titled "Looking Forward to the Past," is expected to display 35 pieces of art created between 1902 and 2011.

Most auctions tend to price artwork highly at auctions, due to the rising number of wealthy investors in the world. "I don't really see an end to it, unless interest rates drop sharply, which I don't see happening in the near future," said Manhattan dealer Richard Feigen. "Buyers will flock in from the Far East, the Gulf and Europe," according to dailymail.

Hence, Giacometti's nearly six-foot (1.8-meter) exhibition of "a wiry man holding up one hand and pointing with the other is the artist's most celebrated sculpture," Gouzer said.

It is said to be a symbol of "when Giacometti became Giacometti, the ultimate work, the Holy Grail of sculpture."

Picasso's nearly four-by-five-foot canvas is "a masterpiece at the level of 'Guernica' and 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,'" Gouzer said. "He painted several versions until he got this one," he added.

He had painted it in 1955, getting the spark from 19th-century French painter Eugene Delacroix and as a "homage" to Henri Matisse, who breathed his last in November 1954.

His is one of the last major paintings in private collection.

The world record for a painting auctioned is $142.4 million for Francis Bacon's "Three Studies of Lucian Freud," sold in New York in 2013.

Giacometti holds another record for "Walking Man I" at $104.3 million in London in 2010.

The auction will open on Tuesday, when Sotheby's presents 69 impressionist and modernist works valued at more than $270 million.