The most expensive paintings in the world. The most expensive paintings in the world

The ranking of the most expensive artists in the world is headed by Leonardo Da Vinci, and completed by Paul Cezanne. The difference in price between the first and last positions in the top 24 ranking is $389.8 million

The rating is based on open auction results. It is based on the results, taking into account the buyer's premium (Buyers Premium), expressed in dollars (figures shown at European auctions, that is, in pounds or euros, are converted into dollars at the exchange rate on the day of trading).

1. $450.3 million Leonardo da Vinci. Savior of the world. Around 1500

Probably next time we will edit this line very soon. $450,312,500 is a record not even for years, but most likely for the whole future decade.

Moreover, according to rumors, the current record in the field of private sales is $ 300 million for a painting by Paul Gauguin), therefore Leonardo Da Vinci's "Savior of the World" is the most expensive painting in the world, not in any separate segment of the art market, but in an absolute sense .

Surprisingly, the historic sale took place in a far from ideal information background. First, there was no complete unanimity among experts regarding the attribution of this work. But many experts agreed with the arguments that it was Leonardo, and not his student Giovanni Boltraffio (Giovanni Boltraffio), and this "broad consensus" for Christie's and the buyer was quite enough. Secondly, the circumstances of finding this thing were like a fairy tale: in 1958 it was bought at Sotheby's for 45 pounds as a thing by a student of Leonardo, then, already in the 2000s, it was bought at an auction for about $10,000, then it was sold to a dealer Yves Bouvier for $80 000,000, and he has already resold the “Savior of the World” to billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, it seems, for $127,500,000. And this is third. The sale took place amid months of litigation between Rybolovlev and Bouvier. The billionaire accuses the dealer that he was not completely honest with him and sold him paintings at exorbitant prices. Leonardo was the rare exception in a string of unsuccessful (financially speaking) purchases. But what!

The auction house Christie's has done a great job of promoting its main lot in recent history. "Savior of the World" managed to watch tens of thousands of viewers. Among them was the actor Leonardo DiCaprio. According to family legend, he was named after the artist, and will soon play the master himself in the biopic. In 2017, Paramount Film Company acquired the film rights to Walter Isaacson's book Leonardo da Vinci. High interest in Leonardo's last years and the future film about him, and even with DiCaprio, of course, cannot be considered among the priority explanations for the phenomenal auction price, but as a concomitant factor - completely.

2. $179.4 million Pablo Picasso. Algerian women (version "O"). 1955

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) - founder of cubism, outstanding painter, graphic artist, sculptor and ceramist, who had a strong influence on the development of all art of the twentieth century.

On May 11, 2015, for the painting “Women of Algeria (version “O”)”, 1955, $ 179.4 million was paid (including commission).

The textbook painting “Women of Algeria (version “O”)” refers to a series of paintings painted by Pablo Picasso from December 1954 to February 1955 based on the famous painting of the same name by Eugene Delacroix. Delacroix's "Algerian Women", belonging to the Louvre collection, once made a very strong impression on Picasso, he repeatedly said that he wanted to write his own version. And this series was also dedicated to the memory of a friend and rival in the artistic workshop, Henri Matisse, who passed away in November 1954. As Picasso said, "When Matisse died, he left his odalisques to me as a legacy." All Picasso's works in this series are numbered with letters of the Latin alphabet from "A" to "O". Thus, the painting, sold for a record price, is the last, fifteenth in the series.

Picasso's "Women of Algiers (O Version)" comes from the collection of Victor and Sally Ganz. This married couple from New York, despite her modest income, managed to create a collection in fifty years, which brought $ 206.5 million at auction in 1997. At the same time, the Ganz spouses spent a total of about $ 2 million on the purchase of all these works. One of the first in their collection a portrait of Marie-Therese Walter by Picasso appeared (the famous painting “Dream”): in 1941, Victor Ganz bought it for $ 7,000, and in 1997 sold it for $ 48.4 million. And as for the work “Algerian Women (version “O ”)”, then its preliminary estimate at the 1997 auction was $10-12 million, and the price of the hammer reached $31.9 million. Almost twenty years later, the result of the Algerian Women was 5.6 times higher than the result of 1997.

3. $170.4 million Amedeo Modigliani. Reclining Nude. 1917–1918

At the thematic auction Christie's "Artist's Muse", which took place on November 9, 2015 in New York, Amedeo Modigliani's painting "Reclining Nude" (1917-1918) was sold for a record $170.405 million. The lot was estimated at $100 million (exact estimate This result raised the record figure for works by Modigliani by as much as $ 100 million: until November 9, Modigliani's most expensive work was the sculpture "Head", sold at Sotheby's in November 2014 for $ 70.7 million.

The record for the painting “Reclining Nude” can be considered phenomenal also because not a single painting work of the artist has ever come close to such figures: previously, only eight of his paintings crossed the auction bar of $ 30 million. sitting on the couch, "sold for $ 68.96 million, including commission auction house Sotheby's. Now Modigliani has confidently joined the "club" of artists whose works are sold for more than $100 million, where he is accompanied by Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Edvard Munch and Andy Warhol.

The painting "Reclining Nude" as well as the previous record holder - "Nude sitting on a sofa" was bought directly from the artist by his friend - a Parisian collector and Marchand Leopold Zborovski (Léopold Zboroswki).

According to Christie's, the Reclining Nude was among several nudes written for Zborowski that caused a scandal at Modigliani's first and only exhibition at the Bertha Weill Gallery in Paris in 1917. Zborowski decided to exhibit several nudes in the gallery window to attract visitors ("Reclining Nude", including). Passers-by immediately crowded around the window. Unfortunately, the gallery's counterpart turned out to be a police station. Law enforcement officials became interested in the crowd that had gathered on the other side of the street, and called the owner of the gallery to the station. According to Bertha Weil, the commissioner to the chuckles of the “poor demons” who were found in the station, he ordered her to “immediately remove all this rubbish.” Which he had to do.

The “Reclining Nude” was often published in catalogs and monographs about Modigliani, she took part in exhibitions at the Center for Fine Arts (Brussels), at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), in State Museum contemporary art (Paris), the Tate and the Royal Academy of Arts (both galleries - London), MoMA (New York) and the Royal Palace in Milan.

The work was part of the collection of Gianni Mattioli, one of the leading Italian collectors, and his daughter, art critic Laura Mattioli Rossi, put up for Christie's auction.

At the auction on November 9, at least six bidders traded for "Reclining Nude" for 9 minutes. The winner was the buyer who bid over the phone. After some time, it became known that the work was bought by Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian. The new owner said that he plans to move her to Shanghai, where, together with his wife Wang Wei (Wang Wei), he opened two private museums. In the world, Liu Yiqian is known as a "taxi tycoon". As a teenager during the troubled years of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Yiqian was indeed turning the wheel on the streets of Shanghai. In the 1980s and 90s, he made his fortune by playing on the real estate and pharmaceutical markets. In 2015, Liu Yiqian's net worth was estimated at $1.5 billion.

4. $144 million Qi Baishi. Twelve landscapes. 1925

December 17, 2017 at the Beijing auction Poly International set an absolute record for auction sales Chinese painting. A series of ink drawings by the Chinese artist Qi Baishi (1864–1957) titled "Twelve Landscapes", dating from 1925, went under the hammer for 931.5 million yuan, or $144 million.

Qi Baishi, the master of national Chinese painting Guohua, was born in 1864 (according to another version - in 1860) in a poor peasant family. Although Qi Baishi showed an interest in creativity from childhood, until the age of forty, carpentry served as his main source of income. But here too it artistic ability found a use for themselves: he carved animal figurines, snuff boxes, woodcut popular prints from wood. And at the same time, he did not give up painting and calligraphy. Only at the end of the sixth decade Qi Baishi moved to Beijing and devoted himself entirely to painting. In his declining years, Qi Baishi, who never received a professional art education, nevertheless achieved recognition at the national level: in 1953, the Ministry of Culture of the PRC awarded him the title of "Great Artist of the Chinese People." Qi Baishi died in 1957 at the age of 93.

Today, the nationwide love of the Chinese for their "great artist" is expressed in money equivalent. For many years in a row, Qi Baishi has been among the most expensive Chinese artists - both in terms of total auction turnover and in terms of the price of individual works. For example, in May 2011, one of his works - “ Long life Peaceful World” (“Eagle on a Pine Tree”), written in 1946 for Chiang Kai-shek, was sold for 425.5 million yuan ($65 million). And in 2016, Qi Baishi was in third place in terms of auction turnover in the world after his countryman Zhang Daqiang and Pablo Picasso. Qi Baishi has now become the first Chinese artist to surpass the $100 million auction mark.

Qi Baishi's "Twelve Landscapes" in blues, greys, browns and pinks depict Chinese mountains, villages and trees in bloom. The size of each of the 12 works is impressive - 1.8 meters in height and almost half a meter in width. The artist's painting is quite traditional, which, apparently, suits millionaire Chinese collectors. Who exactly purchased the "Twelve Landscapes" for record amount, the auction house did not disclose.

5. $142.4 million Francis Bacon. Three sketches with Lucian Freud. 1969

At Christie's post-war and contemporary art auction on November 12, 2013, Francis Bacon's triptych "Three Sketches with Lucian Freud" was sold for a staggering $142.4 million. Such a high price - a record for the artist and for the entire art market - was rather unexpected, than regular. Before the auction, the triptych was estimated at $85 million (the exact estimate was provided upon request). The previous record for Bacon's works, held since 2008, was just about $ 85 million, or more precisely, it was $ 86.281 million. Roman Abramovich paid so much at Sotheby's in New York on May 14, 2008 for the 1976 Triptych .

To reach the price level of the art boom, and even surpass it, the auction house had to get a really outstanding work. The triptych "Three Sketches with Lucien Freud" of 1969 fully corresponds to this definition.

Firstly, with this triptych alone, you join two masters of post-war art at the same time: his no less famous colleague Lusien Freud posed for Bacon. Freud and Bacon met in 1945 and were friends for decades, wrote to each other more than once, but also competed professionally. "Three sketches with Lucian Freud" were created within the walls of the London Royal College of Art (Bacon's own workshop at that time was damaged by fire).

Secondly, it is one of two Bacon triptychs in existence that show the model in full height. The second such triptych, 1966, in last time exhibited at the exhibition in 1992, but it is not known where he is now.

Thirdly, the triptych has a very cheerful background - sunny yellow. Such a positive for the darkly surrealistic work of Bacon, frankly, is not typical. Some foreign analyst, after a record sale, even called this color "the color of gold, magnetically acting on collectors."

Francis Bacon considered this triptych to be one of his finest works; it was one of the most important exhibits at the artist's landmark retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971–1972. Later, in the mid-1970s, the parts of the triptych were separated for almost 15 years. One of them exhibited independently at an exhibition at the Tate in 1985. Bacon reacted extremely negatively to this division; under a photograph of the detached left side of the triptych, he wrote: "a fragment of a triptych ... and I believe that it loses its meaning until it is reunited with the other two fragments." The parts were put together again in 1999, at an exhibition in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. And now, all three full-length portraits of Lusien Freud have gone to a new buyer for $142.4 million. It is said that the triptych was bought by William Aquavella, possibly in the interests of the client.

6. $141.3 million Alberto Giacometti. Pointing person. 1947

Alberto Giacometti is the most highly regarded (literally) classic of world sculpture. His withered, almost ethereal figures, symbolizing the alienation and loneliness of man in the modern world, invariably reach high prices at auction. For some time, Giacometti even overtook all the painters combined: on February 3, 2010, the Walking Man I sculpture was sold for £65 million ($104.3 million). By the way, this was the first auction lot in the world to break the threshold of $100 million.

More than five years later, the Pointing Man sculpture (1947) reached new auction heights: the result (including commission) was $ 141.3 million. This is a record not only for Giacometti, but for the entire sculpture market.

The Pointing Man sculpture was conceived and executed by Giacometti in 1947 in just one night. As the sculptor told his biographer, in a few months his first solo exhibition in 15 years of creative activity was to open in New York. Time was running out, and one October night he sculpted the first plaster model. Six castings and one author's copy were made from it. At the exhibition that followed in January 1948, "Pointing Man" took center stage in the exhibition next to "Walking Man" and "Standing Woman". The exhibition made a splash, Giacometti instantly became the star of the New York post-war art scene.

Today, the Pointing Man sculpture is in the collections of MoMA, Tate Modern and two other museums. The remaining three copies are kept in private collections and collections of various funds. The copy that was put up for auction, presumably the only one that was hand-painted by Giacometti himself. In 1953, it was purchased from the Pierre Matisse Gallery by renowned collectors Fred and Florence Olsen. Since 1970, the sculpture belonged to one private collection, from which it was put up for auction for the first time in history. As the organizers of the auction said, they offered the owner a guarantee, but he refused, saying that if the thing remains unsold, he will keep it for himself. “He may have been a little upset that it was actually bought,” commented a representative of Christie’s.

Giacometti was one of the most exciting artists of the 20th century. Giacometti's man is left to himself, no one needs him, he has no reliance on God, and man does not seek protection from him. Giacometti is a great humanist: his work tells us that a person can only hope for a person, that he is fully responsible for himself and others. The figures of Giacometti have thin, nervous faces, a lively look and large feet: despite all the upheavals, they stand firmly on the ground.

7. $119.9 million Edvard Munch. Scream. 1895

On May 2, 2012, Edvard Munch's The Scream at Sotheby's was bought for $119,922,500. With this result, the 1895 pastel bypassed Pablo Picasso's Nude Against a Bust and Green Leaves (which, by the way, held out at the top of the rating two years without two days).

The painting is one of four existing versions painted on a known subject, and the only one that was in private hands (the other three are kept in Norwegian museums). It is also unique in that on the frame, made by the artist himself, his poem is written in red paint: “My friends proceeded further, / And I remained behind, / Trembling with anxiety: / I felt the deafening Cry of Nature. E.M.

The work was put up for auction by Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen, son of Munch's friend, neighbor and patron Thomas Olsen, who bought it in 1937. After the auction, the former owner said that for him the meaning of the picture is a meeting with death, and also, in the context of today, a frightening awareness of the damage that has been caused by humanity to nature.

The profit from the sale of the painting will partly go to the creation of a museum in the city of Hvitsten (Norway), where Munch and Thomas Olsen once lived; the future museum will house the collection of Petter Olsen, who is also involved in the restoration of Munch's house and workshop.

The price of Munch's painting is a super-record in all respects. Prior to trading on May 1, 2012, the most expensive pastel in the world was the work of Edgar Degas (Edgar Degas) "Resting Dancer" (c. 1879), which earned $ 37 million at the New York auction of Sotheby's in November 2008. This record left far behind Munch's previous record, set by the painting "Vampire" in 1894, which brought in $ 38.1 million at Sotheby's in New York in November 2008 (the Gagosian Gallery acted as the buyer).

8. $110.5 million Jean-Michel Basquiat. Untitled. 1982

On May 18, 2017, the rating of the most expensive works ever sold at public auction was replenished with the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. At the Sotheby’s contemporary art auction, the work “Untitled”, painted in oil pastel, acrylic and aerosol cans on canvas, was sold for $ 110.5 million. The buyer was the Japanese billionaire Yusaka Maesawa - a passionate admirer of modern art in general and Basquiat in particular. He also made the previous record purchase of Basquiat: in 2016, Maesawa bought another work “Untitled” (1982) for $57.3 million. It turns out that on May 18, 2017, the record price for a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat almost doubled.

Baskiev's trademark image of either a mask or a skull broke several records at once. Firstly, it became the most expensive work of an American artist. Secondly, for the first time in history, so much was paid for the work of a black artist. And thirdly, the painting "Untitled" (1982) broke the price record among works created after 1980. Not to mention that with this sale, Jean-Michel Basquiat entered a kind of club of artists whose works are sold for more than $100 million. If Basquiat had lived to see this day, he would have been 57, but, alas, the fatal dose of heroin decreed otherwise: the artist passed away at the fatal age of 27 for many legendary Americans (like Hendrix, Joplin or Morrison).

And it all started on the streets of New York, where 17-year-old Jean-Michel ran away from his father and stepmother (the first unsuccessful attempt to escape happened at the age of 15). Jean-Michel's mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital when the boy was 13 years old and spent most of her life in mental hospitals. The father didn't care about his son. However, one should not imagine the childhood of the future artist full of adversity and humiliation. He grew up with two sisters in a well-to-do family (his father was a successful economist). Jean-Michel received a good education, as a child he read a lot, was fond of history, poetry and, of course, art. He even had a membership on the board of the Brooklyn Museum. Thanks to his Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Jean-Michel was fluent in French, Spanish and English. Jean-Michel was not a "boy from the street" by birth, but became one by his own choice. It was the streets of New York that awakened his artistic talent, shaped Basquiat's unique style, based on his intellectual baggage and the rebellious energy of street graffiti. With all the external primitiveness and "primitiveness", Basquiat's works are deeply conceptual, full of references to the literary and artistic heritage of the past.

Since 1976, inscriptions began to appear on the houses, fences and cars of the New York subway, the meaning of which was vague (like "Plush safe he think ..." - "he thinks that plush protects"). Then every self-respecting street artist signed his work. These inscriptions appeared on behalf of a certain "SAMO" (abbreviated as "same old shit" - if you literally put it, then "everything is the same as always"). This pseudonym was taken by Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz. The friendship lasted until 1979 and ended with the inscription "SAMO is dead" ("SAMO died"). Basquiat began to make his own way to fame. He sold T-shirts, postcards with his drawings, put together a noise-rock band, with which he performed in clubs, starred in independent films. On the advice of a friend, he took up painting seriously.

The first success came in the early 1980s. First, a group and then a solo exhibition, as well as Rene Ricard's article "The Radiant Child" (The radiant child) in the well-known magazine Artforum, made Basquiat widely known in a narrow but necessary circle. In 1982, Jean-Michel met with his idol Andy Warhol, which largely determined the entire future fate of the young artist. Someone believes that Basquiat used the fame of Warhol, and Warhol was fueled by Basquiat's youth and creative energy; others see true friendship in this strange tandem. Be that as it may, the acquaintance and patronage of Warhol made all of America, and then the world, talk about the rising star Basquiat. He was considered the best in a group of young American neo-expressionist artists, which, in addition to him, included Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and others. Jean-Michel's works began to rise in price. Basquiat worked up to 20 hours a day, often without taking off his expensive suits from Armani, and after that, in the same paint-stained suits, he caroused at receptions and parties. Warhol was even jealous of his productivity, saying that Basquiat paints faster than he, Warhol, prints them.

But Jean-Michel was haunted by the thought that everyone was so shaking over him, not because he was a genius, but because he was primarily a black genius. He felt like a toy for the wealthy white public and dutifully played this role. His progressive addiction to drugs from his days on the street was part of the legend behind his popularity. There was a desire to drop everything, go to Hawaii or Maui, open a small tequila factory there and live free, away from fame and everything that accompanies it. Jean-Michel even tried once, when he stopped using heroin and went to Maui for a while. But it didn't. Warhol's death in 1987 was a huge blow to Basquiat. He almost stopped going out of the house, suffered from paranoia, could not work, he injected more and more. The last lethal dose was taken on August 12, 1988. Basquiat was 27.

9. $105.5 million Andy Warhol. Silver car crash (Double Crash). 1963

It would be strange if Andy Warhol (1928-1987), the king of pop art, did not get into the top ten authors of the most expensive works in the world. Then one would have to admit that the mass consciousness and the choice of collectors are two vessels that do not communicate in any way. Because Warhol is perhaps the most popular artist of the twentieth century. Although it was not Warhol who "invented" pop art, it was he who became the face of this trend. He not only ridiculed the cult of consumption, but introduced these ideas into art (while retaining an element of irony in his works), created a new direction that gathered a whole circle of followers.

For six years, Andy Warhol shifted in the last positions of our rating - there were too many masters of "great" and more expensive - from Rubens to Klimt. For a long time, Warhol's best result was $71.7 million, earned by silk-screen printing "Green Crash" (1963) at Christie's in May 2007 (estimated at $25-35 million). But times are changing, and now the masterpieces of the old masters, impressionists or modernists are less and less on the market. Key transactions moved to the segment of post-war and contemporary art. The art of the second half of the 20th - early 21st century is inexorably growing in price, and Andy Warhol's current personal record is a direct confirmation of this.

At the auction of post-war and contemporary art at Sotheby's on November 13, 2013 (the day after a similar auction at Christie's, where the Francis Bacon triptych was sold for $ 142.4 million), Andy Warhol's silkscreen "Silver Crash (Double Crash)" set a new world record for the artist's works - $105.5 million. This work, as well as "Green Car Crash", belongs to the large cycle "Death and Catastrophes", in which the artist reflected the results of tragic traffic accidents.

"Silver Crash (Double Crash)" is part of a group of four Warhol 1963 two-part works depicting car crashes. The other three works in the series are held in museums, with only Silver Crash remaining in private hands. The work has an excellent provenance: she visited the collections of Gunther Sachs (Gunter Sachs), Charles Saatchi (Charles Saatchi) and Thomas Ammann (Thomas Ammann). The work was put up for auction by Sotheby's by a private European collector who has owned it for over 20 years.

The artist transferred newspaper photographs of road accidents to canvas, repeatedly printing them using silk-screen printing with silver reflective paint. The work reaches a size of 2.4 × 4 meters; on one half - a multiple image of a car crashing into a tree; the second part is a monochrome silvery surface.

All components of the success of the auction is obvious: the rarity of the work, its importance in the legacy of the author, a good provenance. It is difficult to say why Warhol is more interesting to collectors today - the brand, the notorious "irony" or some philosophical overtones, however, what in 1962 could be bought for $100 (which was what Campbell's Soup Cans cost then), and in 1978 for a few tens of thousands, is now worth tens of millions.

10. $95.4 million Roy Lichtenstein. Nurse. 1964

The work of Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) is difficult to confuse with something: he became famous for paintings based on multiply enlarged pictures from comics. Like all pop artists, Lichtenstein elevated objects of mass culture to the status of works of high art. Instead of subtle color transitions, there are blocks of pure color, as if they had just come out of a printing machine; instead of complex psychological portraits - cliched beauties from the pages of comics with a standard set of emotions. Lichtenstein reproduced even a raster grid by hand, and deliberately increased or decreased the size of the dots, bringing the content of the work to the grotesque. Comics pictures taken out of context are usually accompanied by emotional text: the beauties of Liechtenstein drown, cry, are jealous, but the beauty and equanimity of the utterly idealized heroines frees us from the need to sincerely sympathize with them, everything is perceived as a beautiful picture - nothing more.

Pictures based on comics, by the way, are far from the only direction in the work of Roy Lichtenstein. The artist's 2013 retrospective at the Tate Modern showed nudes, sculptures, Chinese-style landscapes, abstractions, as well as his own readings of the works of Matisse, Picasso, Piet Mondrian and others: Lichtenstein reproduced such masterpieces as Monet's Rouen Cathedral or “Still Life with a Goldfish” by Matisse is still in the same “comic” style with a raster grid.

Prices for works by Roy Lichtenstein crossed the seven-figure threshold back in the late 1980s, but only since the early 2000s (after the death of the artist) did the market for his works begin to grow rapidly, leading to the current auction record of $95,365 million. So, the $5 threshold million work by Roy Lichtenstein first stepped over in 2002; The 10 million bar was taken in 2005, and in 2012 $44.9 million was already paid for the painting “The Sleeping Girl”. the same as the masterpieces of impressionism. Collectors from all over the world like Liechtenstein's things: clients from China, the USA, Latin America and Europe traded for the same "Sleeping Girl".

By the end of 2013, according to Artprice, the annual turnover of Liechtenstein's works amounted to over $140 million (excluding the BP commission), which allowed him to take the high 8th place in the world ranking in terms of auction turnover. That year, his painting "Woman in a Hat with Flowers" (1963) was sold at Christie's on May 15 for $56.1 million including commission. This is a reworking of one of the cubist portraits of Dora Maar by Picasso in the author's pop art style of Lichtenstein. The record coincided with the artist's grand retrospective at the Tate.

Two and a half years later, at the Christie's "Artist's Muse" auction on November 9, 2015, the painting "Nurse" (1964) was sold for $ 95,365 million including commission (estimate on request). The work belongs to the cult canvases of Liechtenstein of the early 1960s. The image of the sexy beauty of the nurse is one of the key in the post-war culture of the United States, along with the brave American sailors. In Lichtenstein's painting, the bewitching blonde with scarlet lips is as much a pop culture icon as "Marilyn" or "Liz" is in Warhol's silkscreens. Liechtenstein in this case omitted accompanying text source comics, thus giving us a field for interpretation emotional state heroines. She looks visibly frightened - but what is she afraid of?

The Nurse was shown in Lichtenstein's first major solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the New National Gallery in Berlin (both exhibitions were held in 1969). The work was kept in the collection of one of the first collectors of pop art, the eccentric Leon Krauscher, who, according to the art historian Richard Polsky, once said: “Pop art is the art of today. Everything else is junk, antiquity. Renoir? I can not stand him. Pictures for the bedroom. They are all the same. I can say the same about all these abstract expressionists. Decor. There is no satire in them, there is no today, there is no fun.

11. $91.87 million Edward Hopper. Chop Suey. 1929

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is an iconic American artist who painted genre paintings and urban landscapes. He is called "the poet of empty spaces" for his unmistakable author's style. Hopper's paintings are characterized by conciseness and geometric composition, the absence of excessive details, pure colors, large windows, long shadows and, most importantly, his characters are self-absorbed residents. big city. Loneliness emanates from them, even if they are next to each other - in a room, cafe or theater box. Hopper's most famous work is Night Owls. Illuminated by bright electric light, the diner against the background of the thickening darkness of the night resembles a theatrical scene, the characters of which - the bartender, the couple and the man sitting with his back to the viewer - are immersed in their thoughts and hardly carry on a lively conversation. We do not see a single exit from the diner on more than a meter and a half canvas, which further emphasizes the sense of hopelessness.

Another direction in Hopper's work was landscapes, in which empty houses and streets act as the main characters. The artist even invented new genre- a portrait of the house, in which the "models" are named after the names of the owners or the location. The heyday of Hopper's work came in part during the Great Depression. One of the works of this period - the landscape "East Wind over Weehawken" (1934) with a street of empty houses for sale - for a long time was his most expensive work. In 2013, at Christie's, a painting from the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was sold for $40 million (estimated at $22–28 million).

Almost 5 years later, at the auction of works of American painting from the collection of a famous collector national art Barney Ebsworth, Edward Hopper's cult work appeared, one of his best works in private hands, Chop Suey (1929). Chop Suey is a stew of vegetables, soy sauce, meat and spices, a popular dish of Chinese expat cuisine in the United States. Edward Hopper portrayed two girls at a table in a Chinese restaurant serving such a stew. And although the girls came together, and another couple is sitting at a table in the background, the whole work is permeated with a characteristic "Hopper" feeling of loneliness, which is created due to the conciseness of the interiors and colors, the views of the interlocutors, aimed at different sides. The work "Chop Suey" was promised to the Seattle Art Museum for a long time, but the heirs of Barney Ebsworth ordered otherwise and put it up for auction at Christie's with an unprecedented estimate for this artist - $ 70-100 million. The result was $ 85 million, and taking into account the Buyer's Premium commission - $ 91.875 million And most likely, this record will last a long time, since Hopper's works are extremely rare at auction (there are only 350 canvases in his legacy and most of them are in museums), and even more so for such a class as Chop Suey.

12. $90.3 million David Hockney. Portrait of the artist. Pool with two figures. 1972

David Hockney (1937) is one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. In 2011, David Hockney was voted the most influential British artist of all time in a survey of thousands of professional British painters and sculptors. At the same time, Hockney bypassed such masters as William Turner and Francis Bacon. His work is usually classified as pop art, although in early work ah, he gravitated more towards expressionism in the spirit of Francis Bacon.

Born and raised David Hockney in England, Yorkshire. The mother of the future artist kept the family in puritanical strictness, and his father, a simple accountant who drew a little at an amateur level, encouraged his son to paint. In his early twenties, David moved to California, where he lived in total about three decades. He still has two workshops there. Hockney made local rich people, their villas, swimming pools, lawns flooded with the California sun, the heroes of his works. One of his most famous works of the American period - the painting "Splash" - is an image of a sheaf of spray rising from the pool after a person jumped into the water. To depict this sheaf, "living" no more than two seconds, Hockney worked for two weeks. By the way, this painting was sold at Sotheby’s for $5.4 million in 2006 and for some time was considered his most expensive work.

Hockney is over eighty, but he still works and even invents new artistic techniques using technical innovations. Once he came up with the idea of ​​making huge collages from Polaroid pictures, printed his works on fax machines, and today the artist enthusiastically masters drawing on the iPad. The paintings drawn on the tablet take their rightful place at his exhibitions.

In 2005, Hockney finally returned from the States to England. Now he paints in the open air and in the studio huge (often consisting of several parts) landscapes of local forests and wastelands. According to Hockney, in his 30 years in California, he has become so unaccustomed to the simple change of seasons that it truly fascinates and fascinates him. Entire cycles of his recent works are devoted, for example, to the same landscape in different time of the year.

In 2018, Hockney's paintings broke the $10 million mark several times. And on November 15, 2018, a new absolute record for the work of a living artist was registered at Christie's - $ 90,312,500 for the painting "Portrait of the Artist (Pool with Two Figures)". With this result, David Hockney not only topped the list of living artists, but also became the only living artist to be included in our Top World Artists.

13. $87.9 million. Gustav Klimt. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II. 1912

Strictly speaking, "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II" (1912) is not the most expensive of the known works of Gustav Klimt. Shortly before this record-breaking auction transaction, another one took place - a private, closed one, and therefore its results cannot be used for rating. But the result itself is known, or rather, not refuted: another image of the same lady - "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" in 1907 - was acquired through Christie's in the summer of 2006 by perfume magnate Ronald Lauder for $ 135 million. At that time, this amount was the largest ever paid for a single work of art (then it was interrupted by a private deal with the work of Jackson Pollock, bought for $ 160 million). So, formally, the most expensive auction lot by Klimt was “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II” in 1912, which was sold at Christie's auction on November 8, 2006 for $ 87.9 million to a collector who wished to remain anonymous. On the same day they were sold three more paintings by Klimt for a total of $103.4 million.

Klimt's works very rarely appear at auction - and suddenly four canvases are put up at once, and even a museum level. Where? Actually, they are from the museum. We got to the auction at the end of a long restitution dispute. Both portraits and other paintings of Klimt were in Austria, in the family of a wealthy Jewish sugar refiner, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and his wife Adele. 43-year-old Adele died of meningitis in 1925, having bequeathed the paintings to the Austrian government upon her husband's death. In 1938 Austria was annexed by Germany; Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer himself managed to hide in Switzerland, and his paintings, including several works by Klimt, were confiscated, after which some of them were sent to the Austrian Belvedere Gallery, and some were sold. Already in Switzerland, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer rewrote the will in favor of his brother's children. Only Maria (by her husband Altman), who is already 90 years old, has survived to this day. She left Austria for the United States in 1942. The dispute over the confiscated property has been going on since 2000. The Austrian government appealed to one will, the heirs to another. As a result, the Austrian Arbitration Tribunal supported the position of the US Supreme Court and decided to return five works of Klimt to the heirs, headed by Maria Altman.

This decision was not easy and shocked the Austrians. In 2006, there were even reports that the government called on fellow citizens to buy back the canvases in order to keep the national treasure in the country. Then the cost of five canvases (including a portrait bought later by Lauder) was estimated by experts at no less than $ 245 million. It was even planned to issue a bonded loan in order to raise the necessary amount. When the idea failed, Belvedere (including under the pressure of an anonymous threat to destroy the paintings so that they would not go to the heirs), out of harm's way, was forced to remove the canvases from the exhibition.

Gustav Klimt (Gustav Klimt, 1862-1918) - a recognized innovator, founder of the Vienna Secession (an institution that abandoned academicism in creativity), an artist who shocked the public more than once in his by no means puritanical time. Mysterious rumors are steadily associated with the name of Klimt that naked women, including ladies from aristocratic circles, walked in the artist’s garden, inspiring him. Klimt was in high demand during his lifetime. Embodiing the ideas of national symbolism, he achieved the recognition of official authorities and in 1883 Emperor Franz Joseph I even awarded him the main imperial award available Austrian artist, - Golden Order of Merit. The favor of the most influential and wealthy private customers also did not bypass him. The decorativeness, sophistication and eroticism of Klimt's works made them a desirable decoration for the interiors of the most luxurious houses in the early twentieth century. And I must say that little has changed in this aspiration over time.

The sale by the heirs of Klimt's works from the collection of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer is a unique case when things of the world, "museum" scale, in the literal sense of the word, appeared on the market. This happens probably once every few decades, which is why the stakes are so high.

14. $86.9 million. Mark Rothko. Orange, red, yellow. 1961

One of the most mysterious contemporary artists. His life path seems to be woven from contradictions - in creative searches, in actions, in gestures ... Considered one of the ideologists and, of course, a key figure in American abstract expressionism, Rothko could not stand it when his works were called abstract. In the past, who knew well what life was like from hand to mouth, he once defiantly returned to customers an absolutely fantastic advance payment in terms of current money, leaving himself an almost completely completed work. Having waited for his success and the opportunity to earn a living by painting for almost fifty years, he repeatedly refused people who could destroy his career if they wanted to. At least a socialist at heart, who shared the ideas of Marx, hostile to the rich and wealth, Rothko eventually became the author of the most expensive paintings in the world, which actually turned into an attribute high status their owners. (It's no joke, the record-breaking White Center, sold for $65 million, came from the Rockefeller family.) Dreaming of being recognized by a mass audience, he eventually became the creator of paintings that are still truly understandable only to a circle of intellectuals and connoisseurs. Finally, the artist, who was looking for a conversation with the Lord through the music of his canvases, the artist whose works became the central element in the design of the church of all religions, ended his life path with a completely desperate act of theomachism...

Rothko, who remembered the Pale of Settlement and the Cossacks, might have been surprised that they were also proud of him as Russian artists. However, there was enough anti-Semitism in America in the 1930s - it was no accident that the artist “cut down” the family name Rotkovich. But we call it Russian not without reason. For starters, on the fact of birth. Latvian Dvinsk, the current Daugavpils, at the time of the birth of Markus Rotkovich, is part of Russia and will remain so until the collapse of the empire, until 1918. True, Rothko will no longer see the revolution. In 1913, the boy was taken to the USA, the family moved to Portland, Oregon. That is, childhood and adolescence passed in Russia, life perception and outlook were formed here. In addition to the fact that he was born here, Rothko is associated with Russia, we note, both ideological themes and conflicts. It is known that he appreciated the works of Dostoevsky. And even the vices that Rothko indulged in are associated in the world for some reason with Russians. Depression in the West is called for some reason "Russian disease". Which is not an argument, of course, but one more touch to the integrity of the nature of the Russian artist.

Rothko went to innovative discoveries in painting for a long 15 years. Having gone through many figurative hobbies, including surrealism and figurative expressionism, in the mid-1940s he simplified the structure of his paintings to the utmost, limiting the expressive means to a few colorful blocks that form a composition. The intellectual basis of his work is almost always a matter of interpretation. Rothko usually did not give direct answers, counting on the viewer's complicity in understanding the work. The only thing he definitely counted on was the emotional work of the viewer. His paintings are not for rest, not for relaxation and not for "visual massage". They are designed for compassion. Some see them as windows that allow you to look into the soul of the viewer, others - doors to another world. There is an opinion (perhaps the closest to the truth) that his color fields are metaphorical images of a god.

The decorative power of "color fields" is explained by a number of special techniques used by Rothko. His paintings do not tolerate massive frames - at most thin die-edges in the color of the canvas. The artist deliberately tinted the edges of the paintings in a gradient so that the picturesque field lost its borders. The fuzzy borders of the inner squares are also a technique, a way to create the effect of trembling without contrast, an apparent overlap of color blocks, pulsing spots, like the flickering of light from electric lamps. This gentle dissolution of color into color was especially successful in oil, until Rothko's switch to opaque acrylic in the late sixties. And the found effect of electrical pulsation is enhanced if you look at pictures from a close distance. As conceived by the artist, three-meter canvases are best viewed by the viewer from a distance of no more than half a meter.

Today, Rothko's paintings are the pride of any famous museum contemporary art. So, in the English Tate Gallery there is a Rothko room, in which nine paintings from those that were written under contract with the Four Seasons restaurant live. This project is associated with a rather revealing story for Rothko's character. In 1959, the owners of the fashionable restaurant "Vremena Goda", which opened in the unusual New York skyscraper Seagram Building (after the name of the alcohol manufacturer), turned to the artist on the recommendation. The amount of the contract in terms of current money was almost $ 3 million - a very significant fee even for an accomplished, recognized artist, which Rothko was already at that time. However, when the work was almost finished, Rothko unexpectedly returned the advance and refused to hand it over to the customer. Among the main reasons for the sudden act, biographers considered an unwillingness to please the ruling class and entertain the rich at dinner. There is also an opinion that Rothko was upset when he learned that ordinary employees working in the building would not see his paintings. However, the latest version looks too romantic.

Almost 10 years later, Rothko donated some of the canvases prepared for the Four Seasons to London's Tate Gallery. In a bitter twist of fate, on February 25, 1970, the day the boxes of paintings reached the English port, the artist was found dead in his studio, with his veins cut and (apparently to guarantee) a huge dose of sleeping pills in his stomach.

Today, Rothko's work is experiencing another wave of sincere interest. Seminars are held, exhibitions are opened, monographs are published. On the bank of the Daugava, in the homeland of the artist, a monument was erected.

Every year, at auctions of Rothko paintings alone, not counting graphics, about 10-15 pieces are exhibited. They pay millions and tens of millions of dollars. And such prices are not an accident, but rather a tribute to his innovation, the desire to discover new semantic layers and join the creative phenomenon of one of the most mysterious Russian artists.

May 8, 2012 at the auction of post-war and contemporary art Christie's canvas "Orange, Red, Yellow" in 1961 went for $ 86.88 million (including commission). The work comes from the collection of the Pennsylvania philanthropist David Pinkus. David and his wife Gerry bought the 2.4 x 2.1 meter work from the Marlborough Gallery and then loaned it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a long time. The painting "Orange, Red, Yellow" became not only the most expensive work of the artist of Russian origin, but also the most expensive piece of post-war and contemporary art sold at public auction.

15. $85.81 million Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist composition. 1916

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1878–1935) is certainly one of the five most outstanding art revolutionaries of the 20th century on a global scale. Philosopher, innovator, developer of new theoretical approaches, the ideologist of Suprematism, which became calling card Russia in the international art arena. Malevich's works are the pride of the best museums in the world and the pipe dream of many collectors.

The culmination of Malevich's research can be called the work "Black Square" in 1915 (one of the four surviving versions is kept in the Tretyakov Gallery). A thing of high metaphorical significance: the end of a painting, the end of painting, a starting point, a requirement for the development of a project for the future. Supremus, according to the creator's idea, is the highest stage of the avant-garde, able to afford the geometric laconicism of expressive means. In the twenties, Malevich extended his philosophical system to applied areas: Suprematism formed the basis of advanced design and architecture. Malevich also realized himself as a teacher, who discovered talent in his many students, who remained devoted to his ideas even under conditions of persecution. The history of art included the periods of his work in UNOVIS (“Association of Approvers of New Art”, Vitebsk - Petrograd (Leningrad), 1919–1922), in Ginghuk ( State Institute artistic culture, 1923).

The end of the 1920s was marked by a period of repression against the developers of the ideas of the artistic avant-garde. In fact, the "school of Malevich" was dispersed, Malevich himself was arrested. In 1927, during a business trip abroad, the artist managed to hide part of the work in Berlin and, as it is believed, thereby save his ideas from prohibition and oblivion. Malevich died in 1935. And his best works for decades were buried in the vaults of Soviet museums. You could see them only by making acquaintances in the museum environment. Nevertheless, through the efforts of specialists and ascetic collectors (for example, Georgy Kostaki), information about the ideas of Malevich, one might say, spread through underground channels in the circles of the Soviet intelligentsia and influenced the artistic language of representatives of not official art, artists of the sixties.

The most expensive work of Kazimir Malevich among those that have passed through the auction, for almost 10 years now - "Suprematist composition" in 1916. The first appearance of this work at a public auction took place on November 3, 2008. Literally six months earlier, in April 2008, the “Suprematist Composition” was returned by restitution to Malevich’s heirs. Moreover, they were returned not from anywhere, but from the collection of the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum. The museum then had to give up as many as five works by Malevich from its collection, despite the fact that in 1958 the Stedelijk legally bought them from the architect Hugo Haring. Only now Hugo Haring had no right to sell them: Malevich left him these works for temporary storage, but he did not have time to pick them up. In general, a masterpiece fresh for the market with a crystal provenance on November 3, 2008 brought a record $60 million at auction. Among the possible buyers of Malevich's work were either Roman Abramovich or an art dealer of Syrian origin David Nahmad. Whoever this mysterious owner was, after almost ten years, after waiting for the pause put in these cases, he set out to resell his Malevich. We in AI assumed that such significant work it will definitely cost more than $100 million, and our Kazimir Malevich will join the "club" of artists whose works are sold for nine-figure sums. But we overestimated the interest in Malevich among collectors in the top segment. The final price of the hammer at the auction on May 15, 2018 amounted to $85.81 million. With this result, Malevich remained on the second line in the rating of artists of the Russian art circle and for the first time got into the rating of world artists.

16. $84.69 million Claude Monet. Water lilies in bloom. OK. 1914–1917

If you are asked to name the most famous Impressionist painters, the name of Claude Monet (1840-1926) will surely sound one of the first. It was Claude Monet's painting that gave the name to this whole art direction. In April 1874, when he saw Monet's painting “Impression. Rising Sun "(fr. "Impression, soleil levant"), critic Louis Leroy from the newspaper Le Charivari wrote: "Wallpaper, and those would have looked more complete than this" Impression! ". His opinion was shared by most critics of that time - Monet's "Impression" became a negative household name for this whole incomprehensible style, in which the paintings looked more like careless, unfinished sketches than completed works.

But Monet and his Impressionist friends did not pay attention to criticism and continued to paint their “impressions” paintings, in which the fleeting state of nature, air, clouds in the sky and sun glare was more important than the written out of all the details. The Monet family (and the artist married his model Camille Doncieu, which Claude's parents were not happy about) lived in poverty for many years: often there was not enough money not only for paint, but even for bread. At the risk of being left homeless due to rent debts, Monet had to regularly ask for a loan from friends - the writer Emile Zola, Edouard Manet, and others. friends at that time did not die of hunger.

Claude Monet achieved recognition only after forty, and he lived a long, 86-year-long life, managing to outlive both of his spouses (Camilla died of tuberculosis, and 13 years later the artist married Alice Oshed) and his eldest son Jean. In his declining years, Monet began to rapidly lose his sight due to cataracts, but he still continued to paint landscapes around his house in Giverny - the garden, the now famous pond with a bridge and water lilies. At 72, his left eye saw only 10% of normal, while his right eye was only able to see light. At 83, he decided to have an operation, as a result of which his right eye began to see everything in a blue-violet color. Unable to see the world like this, Monet continued to work rather from memory. And it was in the last years of his life that the almost blind Monet created what would later be called the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism - eight huge panels of the Water Lilies, now stored in the oval hall of the Orangerie Museum.

Much water has flowed under the bridge since those early Impressionist exhibitions, to which the public came more to gloat than to admire. Today, impressionism has become one of the most popular styles among the general public. A retrospective of the same Monet at the Paris Grand Palais in 2011 was visited by 920 thousand people. Art lovers were ready to stand in line for three hours in the cold to look at two hundred paintings by Monet. And in the last three days of the exhibition, the museum was kept open around the clock, and 40 thousand visitors passed through its halls. More recent examples include the exhibition of works from the collection of Sergei Schukin at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which became the most visited exhibition of 2017. The exhibition (which had to be extended by two weeks due to its phenomenal popularity) was visited by a total of over 1.2 million people.

If we talk about money, which measures the love of impressionism among those who can afford it, then the answer is simple: big. For Claude Monet, for eight years, the record bar was $ 80.55 million, paid at the peak of the art market, in June 2008, for a late 1919 work, "The Water Lily Pond." In 2016, this record was broken by the sale of a canvas from a textbook series with haystacks in Giverny, captured at different times of the day and different seasons. The painting "Haystack" (1890-1891) at auction on November 16, 2016 was sold for $ 81.45 million, including Buyer's Premium.

In May 2018, it was time for another record: at Christie's auction, the painting Water Lilies in Bloom, written around 1914–1917 in Giverny, was sold for $84.687 million. then seven heart transplants and died at the age of 101. The money from the sale of the collection, according to Rockefeller's will, was promised to be spent on charity. According to eyewitnesses, the final bid was taken over the phone by an employee of Christie's, who works with clients from Asia. So hang, it seems, these "Waters" by Monet somewhere in the mansion or private museum of the Chinese billionaire.

17. $84.2 million Barnett Newman. Black Fire I. 1961

The record for Barnett Newman's Black Fire I came as a complete surprise at Christie's auction on May 13, 2014. That is, not the fact of the record itself, but the amount the contenders managed to reach in the battle of rates. The previous most expensive work by this abstract artist, Onement VI, cost $43.8 million (Sotheby’s, 05/14/2013; estimate $30–40 million), i.e. new record was almost twice as high. The estimate of "Black Fire", by the way, was not disclosed, so we do not know exactly how much it was exceeded. One thing is clear: Newman's abstractions on the art market have reached the same price level as the works of his closest colleague in a group of artists called "color field painting" - Mark Rothko.

Newman belongs to that first generation of American abstract expressionists, which stood at the origins of a huge number of new trends. Artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clifford Still or Jackson Pollock are the roots of the branching tree of American post-war art, they mean to Americans what Malevich and Kandinsky do to us. Therefore, probably, and buy their work for the money. It is not surprising if in a couple of years the corresponding results for Pollock or Still appear in this rating - it is enough to put up for auction their masterpiece of the appropriate level.

Barnett (Barney) Newman was born in New York in 1905 to Polish Jews who emigrated from Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century (if they had lingered a little, we would have had another artist of the orbit of Russian art today). Barney studied painting from the age of eighteen (at the Art Student League of New York with Duncan Smith, Harry Vicki and John Sloane), but he destroyed all his works in the first forty years of his life, including works from the 1930s, when Newman shared a studio with Adolf Gottlieb. In the 1930s, Newman became friends with Markus Rothkovich (later to become Mark Rothko), together they went to painting and poetry classes with the modernist Milton Avery. At an early stage, Barnett was more interested in public and journalistic activity- he put forward his candidacy for the post of mayor of New York, together with his friend Alexander Borodulin, he composed a manifesto "On the need for political initiatives from people of art" and even published the first and only issue of the Otvet magazine, dedicated to the rights of public servants such as teachers, cleaners or firefighters.

At the same time, Newman repeatedly tried to pass the exam in order to obtain a permanent permit to teach painting, but all attempts ended in failure. All this resulted in a protest exhibition “Can We Draw? The Board of Examiners Says - No!" (“Can we draw? The examination committee says no!”), where the works rejected by the committee were collected. The exhibition caused a press hype, Newman was allowed to retake the exam, but again without success. In general, relations with representatives of official art evolved with varying degrees of success. In 1943, Newman, along with Rothko and Gottlieb, composed a response to the New York Times criticism of the American Modernist exhibition. The "aesthetic convictions" of this trio boiled down to the following: "There is no good pictures about nothing. We believe that the theme plays a key role and that only the essence has power, it is tragic and eternal.

A few years later, around 1947-1948, Newman, as he himself believed, reached creative maturity. The artist developed his own recognizable style - large-scale flat fields of pure color, separated by thin vertical stripes (he called them "zips" - "lightning"). These "lightning" determine the spatial structure of the canvas, they simultaneously divide and unite the composition. His cold and strict, but in their own way emotional works seem deceptively simple. No matter how critics called Newman's paintings - and "philosophical statements without artistic skill", and "pure painting without a theme." Barnett Newman himself insisted on the deep content of his works. He called them the names of biblical characters or, for example, the fictional concept of “Onement” (according to art historians, the name of the “Onement” series comes from the word “Atonement” - “redemption”) and wanted them to be looked at exclusively from close range.

Newman's most expensive work, "Black Fire I", was written in 1961, at the same time that his famous cycle "The Way of the Cross" was created, in which a strict black and white palette first appeared. But unlike earlier works from The Way of the Cross, in Black Fire, the black field seems to invade the territory of the white field, it dominates. Just at this time, Newman's younger brother George died unexpectedly. Painting helped the artist fight the bitterness of loss, he expressed his emotions in the language of abstraction.

18. $82.5 million Vincent van Gogh. Portrait of Dr. Gachet. 1890

For a very long time - from 1990 to 2004 - the palm in the ranking of the authors of the most expensive works of art according to the results of auction sales belonged to the post-impressionist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" (Portrait du Docteur Gachet), written by the artist shortly before his death, was purchased by Japanese millionaire Reei Saito on Sotheby auction's in May 1990 for $82.5 million.

The story of the picture itself turned out to be akin to a detective story. In 1896, the portrait was sold by the wife of the artist's brother, Theo van Gogh, to a famous art dealer, after which it passed from hand to hand for a long time. The next significant message about him dates back to the end of the 1930s, when the painting ended up in the Frankfurt Museum, but already in 1938, after the Degenerate Art exhibition held in Munich, the Nazis “acquired” the painting, but soon resold it to the Kramarsky collection. Then the painting ended up in the United States, where its new owners emigrated from Holland to escape the Nazis. After their death, the heirs decided to sell the portrait and put it up for auction in New York in 1990. The picture for the above-named amount was purchased by Japanese millionaire, tycoon Reei Saito, who, according to rumors, bequeathed to bury himself along with the masterpiece. After Saito's death in 1996, the exact location of the "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" was unknown for a long time, which gave rise to a lot of guesswork.

The fact is that Saito, in a fit of anger caused by the fact that in Japan he has to pay very high taxes (about $ 24 million a year), said that the paintings would go to the grave with him. The heirs of the millionaire refused to talk about the fate of the masterpiece, thus confirming the disappointing assumptions. However, some light on the fate of the painting was shed by one of the leaders of the Tokyo auction house, Kyonori Yamamoto, who said that the painting was sold in the United States at a "fair price" - from $87 to $130 million. The name of the new owner was not disclosed. Somewhat later, it was reported that the painting spent all this time in the safe of a Japanese bank - Saito's creditor, but the bank deliberately kept silent so that his name would not be associated with the failures of the borrower. Be that as it may, but until now in all serious publications about Van Gogh, including catalogs, "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" is accompanied by the note "Location unknown."

On the one hand, the history of the painting is shrouded in a mass of secrets, including insane ones: to assume that a person of sound mind as last will can show a desire to take a Van Gogh painting with him to the grave, is almost impossible. At the same time, it is very in the spirit of the artist himself. Or, more accurately, our idea of ​​it. After all, part of the legend of Van Gogh is his madness, which allowed him to look into such depths that are inaccessible to mere mortals. Actually, that's why the "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" - the attending physician from the clinic for the mentally ill, is of such interest. However, in relation to this doctor, Van Gogh himself uttered a mysterious phrase: “First of all, he is much less healthy than me, or at least as sick.”

On the other hand, the concealment of the real location of the masterpiece may have a completely prosaic explanation. If the portrait actually exists, then it is possible that its current owner, whoever he may be, is afraid of a repetition of the restorative story with Klimt's paintings. In 1937, the "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" was confiscated by Goering's henchmen at the Frankfurt Stadel Institute. So, if he showed up now, against the backdrop of precedents with paintings by Klimt and Malevich, the rightful owner is unlikely to give up his rights.

101 years before the unprecedented sale of the Portrait of Dr. Gachet, Vincent wrote prophetically to his brother, Theo: “The practice in the art trade, when prices rise after the death of the author, has survived to this day ... The highest prices that are spoken of and paid for the works of already deceased artists, during their lifetime, would not have risen so much - this is something like trading in tulips, when a living artist has more minuses than pluses.

19. $80.75 million Henri Matisse. Reclining odalisque with magnolias. 1923

Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the founder of such an artistic movement as "fauvism" (from the French fauve - wild), oddly enough, appendicitis pushed him to art. At the age of 19, a young clerk of a barrister, a promising graduate of the Paris School of Law, Henri Emile Benoit Matisse had an attack of appendicitis. After the operation, he had to spend two months in a hospital bed, and the young man's mother, wanting to entertain her recovering son, bought him drawing supplies. As a result, Henri was so captivated by the redrawing of color postcards that, despite the protests of his father, a prosperous grain merchant, he abandoned law and went to study as an artist.

After 15 years of creative searches, having gone through a passion for impressionism and pointillism, Matisse, together with his friends Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and others, chose the main means of expression pure color. The forms in their paintings were simplified and flattened, the light-and-shadow modeling gave way to a contrasting clash of blocks of local colors. The model could well have been depicted with a green nose, if it turned out more expressively. “I don't draw women; I paint pictures,” Matisse proclaimed. The critic Louis Vaucelles, having seen the paintings of this group of artists at the Autumn Salon in 1905, called them "savages" (fr. les fauves). The name "fauvists" was assigned to the movement, although the members of the group themselves never recognized it.

The Fauvist group broke up after a few years, and Matisse went on with his in a creative way, which included a fleeting appeal to cubism (under the influence of the works of his friend Picasso), and a passion for ornaments and the East in general (after traveling to Algeria and Morocco), and a test of oneself in lithography and sculpture, and the experience of monumental painting (which are panels "Dance" and "Music", written for the mansion of Sergei Shchukin in 1909), etc., etc. Multifaceted talent Matisse was appreciated during his lifetime, his exhibitions were held all over the world, and his work sold well. Today, Henri Matisse is one of the most expensive artists. Unless almost all of his best works are already in museums.

And so, on May 8, 2018, the “Reclining Odalisque with Magnolias” (“Odalisque couchée aux magnolias”) of 1923 was put up for Christie’s evening auction. This work belongs to the well-known series of paintings with sensual odalisques, created by Matisse under the influence of the relaxing atmosphere of the south of France, where the artist moved in 1916. "Reclining Odalisque with Magnolias" in the year of its writing was bought at the Autumn Salon by dealers Matisse Josset and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune. In 1956, the work was acquired by the Chicago steel magnate and collector Ley B. Block, and just a couple of years later, David Rockefeller bought Matisse from Block. Since then, the painting, like good wine, has been “aged” in one collection, acquiring the aura of a masterpiece that has been forgotten and desired by the art market.

So, quite expectedly, "Reclining Odalisque with Magnolias" set a new price record for the artist's works. Christie's promoted it as one of the finest works by Matisse ever put up for auction. Estimeyt canvas, according to rumors, was about $ 70 million. The main struggle for the lot unfolded between the head of the department of post-war and contemporary art at Christie's Loic Guzier and the head of Christie's Asia Xin Li. The final bid was from Xin Li (which means that the buyer, most likely, was an Asian collector) - $ 71.5 million, and taking into account the commission, a record $ 80.75 million. The previous record was exceeded by more than $ 30 million: it belonged to a sculptural relief "Nude from the back IV" in 1930, sold in 2010 for $48.8 million including commission.

20. $78.1 million Auguste Renoir. Moulin de la Galette. 1876

In recent years, the circle of art lovers who make open deals at fabulous prices has more or less been defined, and each approximation, and even more so the overshoot of the $100 million auction bar, offers analysts and journalists to choose who from a not too large list could create another sensation.

In 1990, there was no choice, but there was only one person - the same millionaire Reei Saito. A day (!) After he purchased Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" for $ 82.5 million, on May 17, 1990, already at Sotheby's, an eccentric Japanese bought Auguste Renoir's (1841-1919) painting "Moulin de la Galette" for $ 78.1 million. Such significant amounts paid by one person for paintings then became a real sensation in the world of antiques (whom you surprise today!) And strengthened the position of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists as "blue chips" of the art market.

In the auction catalog and press releases preceding the auction, Sotheby's identified the painting "Moulin de la Galette" (Moulin de la Galette, 1876) as "the highest quality work by Renoir, which first appeared on the market." Potential buyers reacted, and the canvas went away under the hammer for a gigantic sum.

It is also noteworthy that, although this painting belongs to the category of textbooks in the work of Renoir, after the death of the artist it was shown to the public only once, at an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1937. Meanwhile, the picture was painted at a time when, after the scandalous exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874 in Nadar's studio, success and recognition came to Renoir, and his style finally took shape. The work sold at auction in 1990 is the author's repetition of the famous "Moulin de la Galette" of the same year, stored in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. Joyful and jubilant mood of the canvas, permeated sunlight, love and carefree fun, has become the hallmark of the artist.

In addition to the obviously high quality of painting, as well as the big name of the author, this painting by Renoir gives a special value (even not monetary - general cultural) that it can be considered a kind of impressionist manifesto - along with the famous canvases “Impression. Sunrise" by Claude Monet and "Breakfast on the Grass" by Edouard Manet. There is everything for which the Impressionists are valued: both a plot taken from life (Renoir found the theme for the painting near the house, on Montmartre, on Cortot Street, in the Moulin de la Galette restaurant), and open air (to paint a scene from nature, instead of in the studio, the artist had to carry a large canvas into the garden, where the light, playing, passed through the foliage of acacias, strewn the ground and clothes of the dancers with blue and pink highlights). In addition, the artist not only accurately and vividly conveyed the atmosphere of the Montmartre dance hall of the 1870s, where clerks from shops, seamstresses, young artists, writers and actresses were going to dance on weekends, but also depicted his friends, prominent representatives of the then Parisian bohemia, in the picture. - the Spanish artist Don Pedro Vidal de Solares, the painters Henri Gervais and Frederic Corday, and the journalist Paul Lot. In general, if a certain collector set out to present in his collection all the main trends in painting, then Renoir's Moulin de la Galette would rightfully become an ideal reflection of the essence of impressionism.

The purchase of this painting for $78.1 million at that time turned out to be a very unsuccessful undertaking. Soon a crisis broke out, and the works of the Impressionists fell in price by almost twenty percent. The boom returned only a few years later. It is not known for certain what happened to the painting after the death of the Japanese collector, there are no open auction data, but, according to unconfirmed rumors, the painting from the Saito collection was sold in 1998 for 50 million to a buyer whose name was not disclosed. However, auction data cannot be directly compared with the amounts of non-publicized private transactions.

21. $76.7 million Peter Paul Rubens. Massacre of the innocents. OK. 1609–1611

Among the leaders of auction sales, represented entirely by impressionists, post-impressionists and modernists, one of the main "old masters" - the famous Fleming Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) - unexpectedly turned out to be. In July 2002, at Sotheby's, his painting The Massacre of the Innocents sold for $76.7 million.

It is very unusual that it was the canvas on the difficult gospel story that reached the high price - it would seem that the Bacchanalia with puffy beauties, for example, should have been more popular. But no. One of the most cruel plots of the New Testament is the execution by the soldiers of the monstrous order of King Herod.

That is why, probably, the organizers of the auction cautiously estimated the painting at 6 million pounds. However, the auction broke out a serious struggle between the four buyers. Ultimately, the canvas was bought by a London manuscript dealer who acted on behalf of an anonymous buyer. As it turned out later, the real buyer was the Canadian collector David Thomson, the son of the newspaper magnate Lord Thomson, the former owner of the London Times.

Perhaps the reason for such a strong excitement was the museum level of the canvas - it was not for nothing that representatives of a number of museums fought for it at the auction, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. An unexpected discovery made by the auction house's expert on Flemish painting, George Gordon, also played its role. The fact is that until recently the painting was attributed to one of Rubens' students, but George Gordon, having studied the similarities between the "Massacre of the Innocents" and Rubens' famous painting "Samson and Delilah" from the collection of the London National Gallery, suggested that the authorship does not belong to the student, but teacher. Although the leading connoisseurs and researchers of Rubens painting confirmed the conclusion of the British expert, the representatives of the auction house, obviously, until the last moment were not sure that they had got a genuine masterpiece of the master, which could decorate, without exaggeration, any museum collection.

22. $71 million. Constantin Brynkushi. Exquisite Girl (Portrait of Nancy Cunard). Concept 1928. Casting 1932

A poor peasant son who came on foot from Romania to Paris, where he was destined to become a pioneer of modern avant-garde sculpture - this is how one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century, Constantin Brancusi, can be briefly described (in Paris he began to be called in the French manner of Brancusi). Constantin Brâncuşi (1876–1957), who came to Paris in 1904 and lived in this city for most of his life, was never ashamed of his simple origin, but, on the contrary, was proud of it and in every possible way supported the legend about himself: he walked in traditional clothes Romanian peasants even to official receptions, and turned his workshop on the outskirts of Montparnasse into a kind of Romanian house with hand-carved furniture and a hearth in which he roasted meat on a sculptor's iron needle.

The talent of the sculptor woke up in Constantine, even when he worked as a messenger in the Romanian city of Craiova. In his spare time, Brâncuși began to carve wooden figurines and once, as the legend goes, he made a violin from improvised materials, which impressed the local industrialist so much that he sent him to study at the art school of Craiova. Then the talented peasant studied at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, and in Paris he worked for a very short time in Rodin's workshop, from where he left with the words "Nothing grows in the shade of large trees." But even this short experience of working with Rodin, of course, influenced the formation of Brancusi as a sculptor - one of his first significant works was called, by analogy with Rodin's masterpiece, The Kiss (1907-1908). Only it was a completely different “Kiss”: Brâncuși moved away from realism towards simplified, geometrized forms; figures of lovers, carved from a single piece of stone, almost square, with a schematic outline of hair, eyes, lips.

From the “Kiss” by Brâncuși, many count the history of modern abstract sculpture. Although the author himself never considered his works abstract. Bringing to perfection his favorite forms of stone, marble, bronze, wood (Brinkushi returned time after time to his series "Kiss", "Head of the Muse", "Bird in Space", "Endless Column", etc.), the sculptor strove not to literally display the appearance of an object or person, animal, but convey its idea, inner essence. Through polished forms, Brâncuși wanted to express a certain fundamental, hidden nature of things. The works of the Romanian sculptor are an amazing fusion of ancient, archaic art, saturated with myths and legends, with contemporary avant-garde ideas.

The most expensive sculpture by Constantin Brâncuša to date is the bronze "Refined Girl (Portrait of Nancy Cunard)" (designed in 1928; casting in 1932). At the evening auction of the Impressionists and Modernists on May 15, 2018, this work was bought for $ 71 million, including commission. Nancy Cunard is a writer, political activist and one of the favorite muses of artists, poets and writers of the 1920s, including Tristan Tzara, Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray, Louis Aragon, James Joyce and others. workshop, but never specifically posed for him. The fact that Brancusi created the sculpture that bears her name, she learned many years later. The first version of the work, entitled "La jeune fille sophistiquée (Portrait de Nancy Cunard)", was made by Brâncuci from wood in 1925–1927. In 1928 he conceived a portrait of Nancy Cunard in bronze. In 1932, Brâncuși himself cast it in a plaster mold in a single copy and carefully polished it. In generalized, semi-abstract forms, the sculptor depicted Nancy's head on a thin neck with hair gathered at the back of her head in a complex bun. Perhaps the shape of the hairstyle refers to the way Cunard twists the strands around her face. Brâncuşi in one sculpture, combining straight lines and feminine curves, smooth and at the same time broken, twisted forms, wanted to convey the contradictory beauty of one of the main muses of the Roaring Twenties. And this Romanian genius, of course, succeeded.

23. $70.5 million Cy Twombly. Untitled (New York). 1968

American artist Sy Twombly (1928–2011) is on our list of the most expensive artists in the world with the record for Untitled (New York) in 1968. At an evening auction of post-war and contemporary art at Sotheby's on November 11, 2015, this painting, belonging to the cycle of the so-called Twombly "boards", was sold for $ 70.53 million, including commission.

Cy Twombly is recognized all over the world, he participated in the Venice Biennale many times, created a ceiling painting in one of the halls of the Louvre. At the same time, he still remains one of the most difficult representatives of American abstract expressionism to understand. As curator Kirk Warned wrote on the occasion of the opening of the Twombly retrospective at MoMA in 1994, “While a huge influence on many artists, Twombly has become a bone of contention for critics. It is incredibly difficult to understand, and not only for the general public: Twombly turned out to be alien even to the founding fathers of highbrow post-war art. What can we say about non-specialists, who for the most part are perplexed: yes, my child will draw better. The article by the aforementioned Varnedu was titled: "Why Your Child Can't Do It: Reflections on the Work of Cy Twombly."

Twombly experts write that the full depth of his creations can only be realized through personal acquaintance with them, and when reproduced, it is completely lost. Everything is made up of a huge number of tiny details - scratches, scuffs, drops, passages written in pencil from Italian and classical poetry. In 1957, Twombly moved to live in southern Italy - hence his passion for the history and poetry of ancient and medieval Europe. Twombly's work also contains references to primitive art, the works of Da Vinci, the readymades of Marcel Duchamp and the works of the Italian futurists, who comprehended mythology through the principles of abstraction.

Away from the bustling art scene of New York, a unique artist was born, who gained recognition relatively late (compared, for example, with his friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns). However, Twombly cared little about this: all his life he avoided journalists and did not pay attention to art critics, many of whom questioned the value of his works. Meanwhile, Twombly experimented with painting style - for example, he tried to draw in the dark to make the drawing less obvious and clear.

What is so special about the same work "Untitled (New York)" to be valued at more than $70 million? At first glance at this and similar things, Twombly often comes to mind with a comparison with a chalk-painted school board. The works of this series are called “boards”. However, this “board” was painted with paint and wax crayons on canvas. According to art historians, in his “boards” Twombly tried to convey a sense of time and movement on a picturesque surface. These rapidly drawn white lines can be seen as natural a natural phenomenon and not the work of man. The artist noted that the most important thing for him is the "living" of each line, each stroke. “The important thing in a picture is not the image, not the illustration, but the direct feeling of its creation, embodiment, conveyed in it,” Twombly said and added: “When I complete the next picture, I usually spend a couple of days in bed to recover.” Such was the involvement of the artist in the process of creating a work. And in Cy Twombly's "boards" the American component of his nature was expressed. Although the first "board" was painted in Rome, then Twombly returned to New York for several years - gray, almost monochrome "boards" were more suitable for the city of skyscrapers than sunny Italy. And, perhaps, it is really difficult for a non-New Yorker to understand what is so special about them - in these mysterious untitled works by Cy Twombly?

24. $70.06 million Fernand Léger. Form contrast. 1913

At the Christie's auction on November 13, 2017, Fernand Léger's (1881-1955) painting "The Contrast of Forms", first put up for public auction, reached a record result for the artist of $ 70,062,500, including the commission of the auction house. The previous record for Léger's work, $39,241,000, had been held since 2012. The Contrast of Forms painting was put up for auction by the Anna Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation. The Fund promised to send the proceeds from the sale to charity.

The auction record-setting Contrast of Forms (1913) is one of the artist's works painted in Paris in the early 1910s. Leger by that time had already experienced a youthful passion for impressionism, since 1909 he painted in the fashionable style of cubism, gravitated towards pure abstraction, and actively exhibited at the Autumn Salon and the Salon of Independents. But the outbreak of the First World War tore the artist out of the creative atmosphere of Paris for two years, threw him into the trenches near the Argonne and Verdun. After being gassed, Léger was discharged from the army in 1917 and returned to work again. After one of the experiences in the war important topics in his work was the theme of the struggle for peace. But even more often the paintings of Fernand Leger began to sing of the urban, technogenic reality. The recognizable style of Leger's figurative works was ironically called "tubism" - for the predominance of tubular forms in the composition.

By the way, the fact that the auction record of the French artist Fernand Léger was set at auction in New York is not surprising. Leger, unlike many of his European colleagues, loved America and often visited it, and from 1940 to 1945 he lived permanently in the States. The frantic pace of life in large American cities, Americans' passion for technological innovations, their love of life had a huge impact on Léger. The artist especially loved New York and called this city "a work of architectural art." The Americans reciprocated. The artist's work during his lifetime was popular among American magnates, and they often ordered monumental works from him. In particular, Leger decorated the New York apartments of Nelson A. Rockefeller, and also created a huge mural "Divers" on Long Island.

25. $68.9 million Willem de Kooning. The woman is like a landscape. 1954–1955

Willem de Kooning is one of the main representatives of abstract expressionism, the greatest artist and sculptor of the post-war period. Born in 1904 in Rotterdam, at the age of 22 he left for America. For many years he was engaged in decorating apartments, shop windows, carpentry, etc., and for painting there was only free time from work. However, during these years, De Kooning met many representatives of the turbulent artistic environment in New York. Communication with Arshile Gorky greatly influenced the future great abstract artist. By the end of the 1930s - the beginning of the 1940s, Willem de Kooning's style (he added the "de" particle to his surname in 1937) had already taken shape, and experts enthusiastically spoke about his abstractions. In 1950, De Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock were already representing MoMA at the Venice Biennale. But then the public did not understand and did not accept his work.

In 1953, Willem de Kooning presented a series of five gigantic paintings of women painted in a pasty, almost abstract manner. In these five famous paintings, the female figure turns into a violent hurricane of colors, restrained only by the picture frame. From biting black lines, golden and silver spots form a head, neck, torso, dissected into pieces in a well-controlled chaos. A woman on de Kooning's canvases turns into a kind of symbol, a "totem", which the artist "serves" throughout almost his entire creative career.

Great commercial success came to Willem de Kooning (more precisely, to his work) during his lifetime. In 1989 (and that was the time of the art boom), de Kooning's two-meter abstraction "Mixing" was sold at Sotheby's for $ 20.7 million, unthinkable at that time for a contemporary artist. True, the author of the work hardly cared about this: to At that time, the progressive Alzheimer's disease made the artist unable not only to work, but even to manage his property, about which the corresponding court verdict was issued. recent years of his life, Willem de Kooning was officially considered the author of the most expensive work of a living artist.

The works of the abstract artist after his death in 1997 continued to grow in price. Moreover, some absolutely fabulous transactions with the works of Willem de Kooning were carried out precisely in private, and not through auctions. From the very beginning, we try to take into all our ratings the results only from open trading floors, since we consider them to be a more realistic reflection of the situation on the art market. Private transactions are more subject to the influence of subjective factors: who buys what and which dealers carry out the transaction, on the basis of which the price is set. Sometimes a millionaire is not sorry to overpay twice or three times, just to get the desired thing. At an auction, the estimate is usually closer to reality, but if a few eager applicants appear for a job, then we can expect a significant excess of the estimate. However, Willem de Kooning's best auction result so far does not compare with his private sales.

We are talking, firstly, about the well-known private sale of the painting "Woman III" in 1953. This work from the very famous series of Willem de Kooning "Women" belonged to the collection of the Tehran Museum of Modern Art since the 1970s. But the Islamic revolution that took place in the country made it impossible for such a secular work to continue to be there. As a result, in 1994, "Woman III" was sold and taken out of Iran. It came to the American collector David Geffen, who, in turn, resold it in a private transaction to Stephen Cohen in 2006 for a crazy $137.5 million at the time. For a short time it was the most expensive work of art in the world. Not Picasso, not Klimt, but an American abstract expressionist of the second half of the 20th century. In this regard, only Jackson Pollock can compare with De Kooning, whose abstractions, or "drips", were bought in private deals for the same money (a few months later in the same 2006, Pollock's work "No. 5" was sold in a private deal for $ 140 million).

In 2016, de Kooning and Pollock paired again. Market insiders reported that in February 2016, in a private deal, billionaire Ken Griffin bought Willem de Kooning's Blending for $300 million (the one that sold for $20.7 million in 1989) and Jackson Pollock's abstract Number 17A for $200 million. This is one of the largest art deals in the world. The current price of the work "Confusion" - $ 300 million - puts this work of de Kooning on a par with the work of Paul Gauguin "Nafea Faa Ipoipo" ("When will you marry?") 1892, sold in a private transaction at the end of 2014 for the same amount. Thus, if we take into account not only the auction results, but also information about private transactions, the paintings by Willem de Kooning are among the most expensive works of art in the world.

But the ranking in our rating is based on auction results, and according to these indicators, Willem de Kooning is still far behind leaders like Picasso or Giacometti. Even more - the auction reason to add him to the top world artists appeared only at the end of 2016. Abstraction "Untitled XXV" 1977 at the auction of post-war and contemporary art Christie's on November 15, 2016 was sold for $ 66.3 million. Two years later, at the auction of American art from the collection of Barney Ebsworth on November 13, 2018, the painting "Woman like a landscape" in 1954-1955 surpassed the previous record. The hammer price of this work, which the eminent American art collector Barney Ebsworth has owned since 1997, was $68.9 million. This is De Kooning's current auction record. Let's see what will happen next.

26. $65.2 million. ZHAO Wuji. June - October 1985. 1985

The abstract artist Zhao Wuji (Zao Woi-Ki, 1921–2013) can equally be considered their artist by both the Chinese and the French. Born in Beijing, he learned the techniques of traditional Chinese painting at the Institute of Fine Arts in Hangzhou (and Zhao Wuji entered there at the age of 14), and then, on the advice of his teacher, he left with his family for France, Paris, where he settled in Montparnasse and soon entered the circle modernists, including Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Stael, Alberto Giacometti and others. In search of his own style, the artist went from Chinese art to Western influences, and then again remembered his roots and began to use traditional techniques of Chinese painting with brush and ink in his abstractions. The synthesis of eastern and western currents eventually resulted in huge abstract canvases, which, starting in 1959, Zhao Wuji stopped giving names. He simply put the dates of writing in the title so that the viewer would not be shackled by the inevitable associations of specific titles, but could look for meanings in the works himself.

It is interesting that success came to Zhao Wuji during his lifetime, not only in the West, where the passion for abstract art has a long history, but also in Asia, where his exhibitions were held and rich customers appeared. For one of them, the architect of the Raffles City building complex in Singapore, Zhao Wuji wrote huge triptych"June-October 1985" is 10 meters long and 2.8 meters high. This triptych graced the lobby of the Raffles City main building. On September 30, 2018, at Sotheby's in Hong Kong, the triptych "June - October 1985" was put up with an estimate of $45 million, and sold for $65.2 including commission. This is a record for a Chinese work painted in oil on canvas rather than in traditional techniques.

27. $60.5 million. Paul Cezanne. Drapery, jug and compote. OK. 1893–1894

The presence in the list of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) is a kind of tribute to the discoveries and searches of the artist who laid the foundations of cubism and a number of other trends of the twentieth century. It is noteworthy that this classic and so typical for Cezanne painting - “Drapery, jug and compote” was purchased at the auction for a record amount. This still life is part of a series of six works depicting the same subjects. The painting was sold at Sotheby's in 1999 for $60.5 million.

In this work, all the brightest features of the artist's manner were manifested: the desire to reduce all objects to geometric shapes - a cylinder, a ball and a cone, the clarity of color, the monumentality of form. If the Impressionists tried to capture the changing features of nature, then Cezanne created "pictures for museums", conveying an unshakable part of nature. He managed to combine several points of view on objects in one picture, combining the techniques of direct and reverse perspective, which prepared the transition to cubism. He painted his still lifes for a long time, carefully checking the images. Cezanne's finds gave rise to a whole army of his ideological followers, "Cezannists", who share and develop the ideas of the artist. His influence on world art turn of the century and, of course, Russian art (remember " Jack of Diamonds”) is difficult to overestimate.

Julia Maksimova, AI
Vladimir Bogdanov, AI
Maria Onuchina, AI
Anna Savitskaya, AI

Have you ever thought about how much the most expensive painting in the world costs? There are many paintings with a price of more than 1 million US dollars, but there are paintings that are worth from 100 million dollars. It is difficult to truly appreciate these masterpieces of world painting - almost all the authors of the most expensive paintings ever sold have passed away and will no longer be able to create something like this. And because of this, the price of these paintings simply increases with time. So, we present to your attention the TOP 10 most expensive paintings in the world.

10 PHOTOS

1. No. 5, 1948, Jackson Pollock - $140,000,000

No. 5, 1948 sold for $140 million when it was sold by David Geffen to David Martinez in 2006. The piece, made on an 8' x 5' fiber barrel, embodies the unique painting technique used by Pollock, one of the greatest expressionist painters. This is a typical Pollock painting, not very accessible in perception, but which is the basis of the evolution of modern art. Pollock was famous for a unique painting technique in which, after placing a canvas on the floor, he applied paint by making it drip from sticks, syringes, and hard brushes.

2. Masterpiece, Roy Lichtenstein - $165,000,000

Roy Lichtenstein is one of the pioneers of pop art culture. His most famous work, Masterpiece (1962) has some classic pop art and comic book elements. The painting was part of Lichtenstein's first exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, which featured other works such as The Drowned Girl and Portrait of Madame Cezanne. Now, some critics have dismissed "Masterpiece" as just another understated and glamorous picture, while others believe the picture has a deeper meaning.

3. Reclining Nude, Amedeo Modigliani - $170,400,000

The Reclining Nude, also known as Red Nude or Rellining Nude, is a 1917 oil painting by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. The painting is a seamless fusion of classical idealism and modern sensibility. The painting of a naked woman lying on a sofa looks erotically realistic, but has a surreal, almost sublime beauty that draws the viewer in. There is nothing crude or vulgar in this picture. Instead, she is perceived as a sensual, aroused woman in her prime who is not afraid to give and demand physical pleasure.

4. Les Femmes d'Alger, Picasso - $179,400,000

In 2015, Les Femmes d'Alger Version O sold a painting for US$179.4 million to set the world record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. This painting is the culmination of a series of 15 works "Women of Algiers" by Picasso. This work perfectly demonstrates Picasso's penchant for creating pieces that have a vintage feel, yet remain completely fresh in approach.

5. No. 6, Mark Rothko - $186,000,000

Rothko's style is characterized by the use of large canvases and horizontal bands of bright colors. Here Rothko uses a spartan palette with the darkest shades on top, symbolizing the depression that haunted him.

6. No. 17A, 1948, Jackson Pollock - $200,000,000

Abstract Expressionism was a popular post-World War II art that emphasizes the subconscious and spontaneous creation. The work of Jackson Pollock belonged to this school of painting - his technique of dripping paint has its roots in the work of André Masson and Max Ernst. This piece of abstract work was created sometime in 1948 and featured in a 1947 Life magazine article.

7. When will you get married? Paul Gauguin, $210,000,000.

In 1892, a painting by Paul Gauguin became the most expensive painting in the world. His painting of two Tahitian girls broke a world record in February 2015 when it was bought by Qatar museums from private Swiss collector Rudolf Stahelin for an astounding $300 million.

8. Card Players, Paul Cezanne, $250,000,000

The card players were purchased by the Qatar royal family from Greek shipping magnate George Embirikos for a whopping US$274 million.

9. Exchange, Willem de Kooning, $300,000,000. 10. Savior of the world, Leonardo da Vinci, $450,300,000

The Savior of the World was allegedly written by Leonardo da Vinci (many critics believe otherwise). The painting depicts Jesus Christ dressed in Renaissance robes and giving a blessing, holding a crystal ball in his left hand. The glass ball in the hand symbolizes the crystalline spheres of heaven - Christ is shown as the savior of the world and the master of the cosmos.

Recently auction house Christie's sold the painting for more than $90 million. It is called "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" and became the most expensive work of a living artist sold at auction.

Even with all the records, she became only the fiftieth in the list of the most expensive paintings in the world. Likeyou has compiled a list of twenty works sold for the most money.

1. Savior of the World, $450.3 million

What is famous
Around this work of Leonardo da Vinci there is a lot of controversy and mysteries. Someone considers it the last original painting of the artist in a private collection, and someone considers it a “remake”, to which da Vinci has nothing to do.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2017 for 450 million.

How much would it cost today
As many.

2. Exchange, $310 million

What is famous
Willem de Kooning began to work in the style of abstractionism precisely with The Exchange. It is believed that the picture reflects the ugly reality of the new world.

300 million in 2015

How much would it cost today
310 million

3. Card Players, $272 million

What is famous
This is one of five paintings in Paul Cezanne's "The Card Players" series.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2012 for 250 million

How much would it cost today
272 million

4. “When will you get married?”, $217 million

Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), Paul Gauguin (1982) – sprzedany za 300 Million USD 😳
Obraz przedstawiający dwie dziewczyny z Tahiti jest najdroższym sprzedanym obrazem. Z niepotwierdzonych informacji wynika, iż obraz nabył któryś z bogatych szejków z Kataru. pic.twitter.com/KJH0xLigH5

What is famous
A painting by Paul Gauguin depicts his wife. At the time of their wedding in Tahiti, she was only thirteen years old.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2015 for 210 million.

How much would it cost today
217 million

5. Number 17A, $206 million

Corrijo, son 300 millones. El Pollock que veis al fondo, Number 17A (1948) se ha vendido a la misma persona por 200. pic.twitter.com/MKzl2QFDfr

What is famous
The painting was painted by Jackson Pollock without sketches. Amazing, right? Moreover, he used the floor as an easel and spray from brushes and a syringe.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2015 for 200 million

How much would it cost today
206 million

6 Water Snakes II, $191.3 million

What is famous
Little is known about this work by Gustav Klimat compared to The Kiss.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2013 for 183 million.

How much would it cost today
191 million

7. "No. 6. (Purple, green and red)", $ 192 million

What is famous
Mark Rothko tried to convey pure emotions with bright colors, but his contemporaries kept trying his work on their interiors. In fact, repeating his work is not as easy as it seems.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2014, they sold for 186 million rubles.

How much would it cost today
192 million

8. Portraits of Meren Solmans and Opoen Koppit, $186 million

What is famous
The paintings have been ordered married couple already known then artist Rembrandt right after the wedding. The family did not last long and in 1878 the painting was sold to a private collection. And later the paintings were bought by France and the Netherlands, but they are always exhibited together.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2015, 90 million

How much would it cost today
186 million

9. Algerian Women (Version O), $185.2 million

What is famous
This is a series of as many as fifteen paintings, and it is called "Version O".

When and for how much was it sold
In 2015 for 179 million.

How much would it cost today
185.2 million

10 Reclining Nude $175.9 million

What is famous
Amedeo Modigliani has painted many nudes, and the Reclining Nude will not be the only one on this list.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2015 for 170 million.

How much would it cost today
176 million

11. No. 5, 1948, $170 million

What is famous
Another work by Jackson Pollock, which is considered one of the most famous works in the style of abstract expressionism.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2005, for 140 million

How much would it cost today
170 million

12. Woman III, $166.9 million

What is famous
The painting by Willem de Kubink is part of a series where the focus is on a woman.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2006, for 137.5 million.

How much would it cost today
166.9 million

13. Masterpiece, $165 million

What is famous
The Pop Art painting was painted by Roy Lichtenstein and reflected the state of contemporary society at the time. Today, the problems with his paintings are not out of date.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2017 for 165 million.

How much would it cost today
As many.

14. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, $163.9 million

What is famous
The painting was inherited for a long time, but in the end it was bought by a private individual.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2006, for 135 million

How much would it cost today
163.9 million

15. Dream, $162.8 million

What is famous
Pablo Picasso painted his beloved in the picture and in just one day.

When and for how much was it sold
In 2013 for 155 million.

How much would it cost today
162.8 million

16. "Reclining nude (on the left side)", $ 157.2 million

Painted nearly a century ago, ‘Nu couché’ is the greatest work from the iconic series in which

Powerful people tend to convert aesthetics into money. If you think that most expensive paintings in the world are at exhibitions, then you are deeply mistaken. Such copies were put up for auction. Of course, not all people understand this art. Someone considers a masterpiece a daub, and someone is ready to give exorbitant amounts of money for a picture. In any case, you should familiarize yourself with the most masterpiece paintings.
We will tell you about the paintings that turned out to be the most expensive in the world. In this rating, you will not meet the well-known "Mona Lisa" by Leonardo da Vinci. Since this masterpiece is insured for a huge amount of money. To be more precise - for 100 million dollars. On this moment"Mona Lisa" got into the Guinness Book of Records for this very reason. It should also be borne in mind that if we translate into today's dollar exchange rate, then this amount is already 670 million.

So, on the 10th place of our rating is a picture "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" for $87.9 million. This is another masterpiece by Gustav Klimt. Of course, like any other painting, it has its own exceptional history. Why is this particular woman depicted? The famous industrial magnate sponsored many artists, one of whom was Gustav. Adele Bloch Bauer was the wife of a magnate. Gustav wanted to thank a wealthy man for financial assistance.
Who was this woman? There is nothing special here. A lady of Jewish origin was in charge of the most famous salon, which was constantly visited by both artists and other people of creativity. By the way, this is the only woman that the artist painted twice. For your information, the second painting by Adele was also bought at auction for 135 mol. dollars. And this masterpiece in 2006 at an auction was purchased by a collector who wished to remain anonymous. How did the paintings get up for auction? After Adele's death, her husband gave the portraits to an Austrian gallery. Then - the paintings were stolen from the gallery. In 2005, after the trial, the paintings were returned to the descendants of the lady. And only then they got to the auction. "Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer" sold for $135 million. We have already mentioned this masterpiece. Also, the picture of Gustav Klimt is called "Austrian Mona Lisa" and "Golden Adele". Rumor has it that the girl was the mistress of the artist. The American businessman Ronald Lauder bought the painting.

An abstract view of people by Pablo Picasso
Painting "Dora Maar with a cat" was sold for $95.2 million. Interestingly:

• the picture was painted in 1941
• the cat is not so easy to see here because of the figures that were used when writing
• bought by Russian businessman Rustam Tariko.

The picture looks very strange, unique and majestic. Apparently they are telling the truth. Pablo Picasso is not a talented artist, but a crazy genius. His relationship with a woman was very romantic. But the couple had a very extraordinary thinking and characters. Therefore, the portrait of Dora is very distorted. There are no clear lines and edges here, as in her inner state of mind.

Andy Warhol is one of the most famous contemporary artists
Even if you are a person who understands almost nothing in art, then for sure you know Andy Warhol from his paintings of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Warhol's favorite themes are:

1. repetition of the image
2. death threat
3. worldwide fame.

Painting . The picture was created in 1963. For forty years she occupied a place of honor among other creations of the collector Annibale Berlinghieri. In 2008, he decided to put it up for auction. The painting sold for $100 million to an unknown person.

Seventh place and again Pablo Picasso. The work was written by Picasso when he was 24 years old. History is silent about what kind of guy this is, why he has a pipe in his hand, and a crown of roses on his head.
Sotheby`s auction found the owner's painting. They again turned out to be an unknown person who did not spare 104 million dollars for the product. It is interesting that the original cost of the painting is 70 million. How did the work of art end up at auction recently? The first owner was John Hay Whitney. He bought "Boy with a pipe" for only 30 thousand dollars in 1950.

Another masterpiece by Pablo Picasso
The painting was painted back in 1932. - this is the personification of the soul and body of the mistress of the artist Marie-Therese Walter. Pablo met his beloved in 1927. The painting was recently sold. To be more precise, in 2010 at the Christie's auction. It was acquired by an unknown collector for 196 and a half million dollars. And again, initially the picture was purchased for only 19 thousand USD. the Brody family in 1951. After the death of her husband, the widow Sidney decided to sell the masterpiece.

1. blood red sky
2. screaming figure
3. some generalizations of the landscape.

Petter Olsen, its first owner, part-time Norwegian billionaire, put the masterpiece up for auction. sold for $119 million 922,000.

• the picture was not written, strokes and strokes were used here
• each piece of a masterpiece is a kind of symbol
• the masterpiece is named the best among all the paintings of the artist

The owner of the painting was an American collector David Geffen. He sold it in 2006 to millionaire Stephen Cohen for as much as $137.5 million. This instance can be considered and studied forever, each time learning something new.

In second place in the ranking of the most expensive paintings in the world is a mysterious painting, you can even say that this is the whole Universe or the imagination of one person. The painting was painted by a world-famous abstract artist Jackson Pollock. He is also called the inventor of "action painting". The artist amazed the world with his thinking. He is sure that the main thing is not the result of the picture, but the creative process, experiences at this moment and so on. Every time something disturbed him, he wanted to shout about something, he poured out his soul by splashing and pouring paint. The main colors on the masterpiece:

1. yellow
2. brown
3. grey

You should not try to understand what exactly the artist was thinking about, what he was puzzled by and what he was going through. This picture can be interpreted in any way, you just need to connect your own imagination. Auction Sotheby's closed regime found the owner of this masterpiece. The painting was bought by David Geffen, a well-known collector of the most masterpiece paintings. And the cost "Numbers 5"- exactly $140 million.
Surprising but true. Here, not the usual canvas was used, but a sheet of fiberboard. It was yellow and brown sprays that were applied here. A grey colour was at the very beginning. This masterpiece is more like a big nest.

The most expensive painting in the world

So, here is the final of our rating. The most famous work of art bought by the royal family of Qatar -. The author of the masterpiece is a French artist Paul Cezan. It took exactly 1 year to draw, starting in 1892 and ending in 1893. The royal family bought the painting 2 years ago. This is the most expensive cost for a masterpiece of open auction, namely - 250 million dollars.

True art is simply priceless. We have reviewed those masterpieces that have already been sold. But it's a sin not to pay attention to those paintings that have already been evaluated, but have not yet found their owner. Let's consider some of them. We do not know, perhaps, some of these masterpieces will be sold today at a closed auction. And perhaps these paintings will find their owners very soon.

Vincent van Gogh
The painting is estimated at 85 - 130 million dollars. Her whereabouts remain unknown at this time. The portrait was painted in 1890. After it was painted, the painting mysteriously ended up in the United States during World War II. Then she migrated to Amsterdam Siegfried Kramarski. And only in 1990 the picture stopped at Christie`s auction.
What is surprising about the portrait?

1. this is the latest creation ingenious wang Goga
2. written 2 weeks before death
3. the protagonist is not a simple character, but a real psychiatrist Paul Gachet, who treated the artist.

The face expresses longing, sadness and chagrin. It is not known why the artist saw his doctor, whom he trusted, so sad before his death. Here we can only guess.

I would also like to recall a few words about Russian artists. Consider some of the masterpieces that were not included in the rating of the most expensive paintings in the world, but became the most valuable in Russia.

Mark Rothko

The picture was painted in 1950. It was sold for 72.8 million dollars. This masterpiece is considered to be the 12th most expensive painting in the world. The question of what Mark can be called the native Russian soul is also debatable. He was born in Latvia, and left Russia at the age of 10, when there was not yet a word about what he would paint. Therefore, we will not mention such artists.

Kazimir Malevich

Of course, this artist is known to everyone, from young children to those who do not understand anything in art, thanks to the "Black Square". Nevertheless, the Suprematist composition, which was written in 1915, became the most expensive creation of Malevich. In 2008, the painting was sold at Sotheby's for $60 million.

What way did the composition before the Sotheby's auction?

Casimir decided to arrange an exhibition of his works back in 1927. For this purpose, he brought to Berlin about a hundred of his works. But absolutely unexpectedly he was called back home. The paintings remained in the custody of the famous architect Hugo Hering.
At the time of the Nazis, it was very difficult to preserve such paintings, but the architect succeeded. As a result, in 1958 the paintings were sold to the Dutch museum Stendelek. Malevich had already died by this time.
At the beginning of the 21st century, about 40 of Malevich's heirs began proceedings in court. After all, in fact, Hering is not the owner of the paintings. It was possible to sue only 5 paintings. One of which was "Suprematist composition". And only after such a long journey, the painting was sold to Sotheby's.

The value of paintings lies in aesthetics and spiritual enlightenment, and it is not always possible to define these categories in terms of money. But these days, everything irrational is becoming available, and people easily convert aesthetics into coins. The price of a painting is also influenced by the outstanding abilities of the artist and the skills of the seller. Besides, the most expensive works of art are those paintings that were sold, sold and will be sold. We will not be able to evaluate, for example, the Mona Lisa, as it has never been sold, and therefore is a priceless copy.
So, what are the pictures proclaimed?

The most expensive painting in the world - 1st place. Number 5, Jackson Pollock, $140 million

Number 5 - Jackson Pollock $140 million

The first famous painting called "Number 5" was created in 1948 by the artist Jackson Pollock. He created his works in the style of abstract expressionism. He became the founder of the so-called "action painting". It consisted in mixing colors on canvas with the help of the spontaneity of the artist, resulting in an abstraction. As for "Number 5", this is a classic of the genre, which shimmers with brown and yellow flowers. You can interpret the picture in different ways, it all depends on the imagination of the viewer. This work of art was sold at a Sotheby auction, which was held behind closed doors.

The cost of the painting was estimated at 140 million. The happy owner of the painting was David Geffen, a man well known in art collector circles.

Second place. Woman III, Ville de Cougny, $137.5 million

"Woman III", Ville de Cooney, $137.5 million

The next instance that requires our close attention is a piece of art called "Woman III", created in 1953 by the artist "Woman III". The owner of the painting was also the collector David Geffen, already known to us, who, in turn, sold this work to Steve Cohen, an American billionaire in 2006 for 137.5 million US dollars. It is considered the best work of the artist De Cooney, which is not in museums.

Third place. "Golden Adele" Gustav Klimt, $ 135 million.

Another painting sold for fabulous money is "Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I", created back in 1907 by the artist Gustav Klimt. This portrait has another name "Golden Adele" and is a masterpiece of Art Nouveau. The woman in the portrait was a beauty of Jewish origin. She was in charge of the salon, where artists and other representatives of Bohemia often visited. Moreover, she became the only woman whose portrait the artist painted twice. After Adele died, her husband gave all the portraits to an Austrian gallery, later the Nazis stole this painting from the gallery. Only in 2005 did it pass after a lawsuit to the descendants of Adele. And in 2006 this work of art was sold for 135 million. dollars to Ronald Lauder.

Fourth place. "Nude against the background of a bust and green leaves", Pablo Picasso, 107 million.

The next one in our ranking is called "Nude against the background of a bust and green leaves", which was written in 1932 by the famous artist, the author of many world masterpieces, Pablo Picasso. She was sold for 107 million. US dollars relatively recently in 2010. The buyer is still unknown, as he bought this painting at Christie's auction anonymously. Marie-Therese Walter is depicted in this painting. This lady was the artist's lover. The painting contains blue and pink tones, which indicates that it was the crowning achievement of Pablo Picasso. The original owners of the painting, Sidney F. Brody and her husband, purchased it in 1951 for $19,000, but after her husband's death, the decision was made to resell Nude with Bust and Green Leaves.

Fifth place. "Boy with a pipe" Pablo Picasso, $ 104 million

One more picture Pablo Picasso "Boy with a pipe", written in 1905, was also sold in 2004 for 104 million dollars. The author painted this picture in the pink period of his work. It depicts a young man holding a pipe in his left hand. On his head is a crown of roses. Previously, the cost of this painting was estimated at 70 million dollars, but there were those who wanted to buy it for a lot of money. John Hay Whitney was the owner of this piece of art for a long time, which he purchased in 1950 for only $30,000. The real owner of the painting remains unknown to this day.

Sixth place. "Triptych", Francis Bacon, $86 million

The next painting was bought for $86 million at Sotheby's in 2008. This "Triptych", written Francis Bacon in 1976. Roman Abramovich became the proud owner of this work. The painting depicts a plot taken from the mythology of ancient Greece, which shows the persecution of Orestes by the Furies. It is symbolic and tells about human suffering on Earth.

Seventh place. "Portrait of Dr. Gachet", Vincent van Gogh, $ 85 - 130 million

"Portrait of Dr. Gachet", painted in the late 19th century in 1890. The author of this painting is Vincent van Gogh. This portrait ended up in the US during World War II. Further, the painting was sold to Siegfried Kramarsky in Amsetrdam. And ended up at a Christie's auction. It is the last creation of Van Gogh, which he wrote a couple of weeks before his death. The main character of the picture is the psychiatrist Paul Gachet, who was the doctor of Van Gogh himself. The face of the psychiatrist expresses sadness and sadness. For 15 years it was considered most expensive painting in the world, its cost was estimated at 85 - 130 million US dollars. However, it is still unknown who and where is located.

Thus, you see that the most expensive paintings in the world are sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. But until now, the value of many paintings has not been appreciated, since true art is priceless.