New York, May 21 (EFE).- A Qatari sheikh was the buyer who paid $179.36 million for Pablo Picasso’s “Les femmes d’Alger,” making it the priciest painting ever auctioned, the daily New York Post reported Thursday.

The mysterious buyer of the Spanish painter’s work was identified by the New York paper as Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, who was the prime minister of Qatar from 2007 to 2013.

The painting was sold on May 11 at Christie’s auction house in New York and the anonymous buyer placed the winning bid by telephone represented by the director of the modern art department, Brett Gorvy, the daily said.

“The painting almost certainly will not go on public display in Qatar because of the nudity, even though it is a cubist work,” one unidentified source told the Post.

The work is the last of a series of 15 paintings in which Picasso recreated in cubist style the same-named work by French artist Eugene Delacroix.

“Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” exceeded the old auction record set by “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” by Francis Bacon, which was purchased in 2013 for $142.4 million by the sister of the emir of Qatar, Mayasa bin Hamad al Thani.

Apart from the auction circuit, the highest price ever paid for a painting was for “Nafea Faa Ipoipo” by Paul Gauguin, which was acquired by a Qatari collector in a private sale for some $300 million.

The Royal House of Qatar, a rich oil emirate on the Persian Gulf, has steadily become an important presence in the international art market. EFE