Pablo Picasso is one of the most celebrated artists of all time. As such, his work will fetch a pretty penny from art connoisseurs, who are more than willing to dig deep into their wallets to bring home an original Picasso. On Monday night, Pablo Picasso smashed another artworld record. His 1955 painting, "Les femmes d'Alger (Version O)," became the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction sold when it sold at Christie's annual spring auction in New York City for a staggering $179.3 million, $39.3 million over the estimate. The artist now holds five of the world's most expensive artworks. From Renoir and van Gogh to Warhol and Pollock, flip through The Daily Beast gallery to see who else tops the list.
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In 1990 Japanese paper magnate Ryoei Saito purchased Renoir’s At the Moulin de la Galette for $78.1 million. Painted in 1876, the piece depicts a typical Sunday afternoon in Paris where the working class would get dressed up and dance in the square.
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A Renoir wasn't the only thing Saito got his hands on. He also aquired Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which was painted in June 1890. The masterpiece is one of the acclaimed artist’s lesser-known paintings, but it still sold for more than $82 million almost a century to the day after van Gogh finished it and sold it for $58. Dr. Gachet would be the last physician to treat Van Gogh, who killed himself six weeks after completing the painting.
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Picasso’s Dora Maar au Chat, a painting of one of the artist’s many mistresses, fetched $92.5 million in 2006. After intense bidding, a private collector nabbed the painting, a four-foot-by-three-foot masterpiece with green, red, and purple polka dots and stripes. Sotheby’s flew the painting around the country to entice buyers. It even made a stop in Las Vegas. at the home of casino mogul Steve Wynn.
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In 2004 his Boy With a Pipe sold for $104 million. Sotheby’s, which called the painting one of the most important Picasso pieces to ever hit the market, wouldn’t say who purchased it. (Before the auction, analysts estimated the painting was worth roughly $70 million.) Picasso painted the portrait in 1905, when he was 24 and had just settled in Montmartre, France.
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Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust is another Picasso painting with a nine-figure price tag. An anonymous buyer purchased the masterpiece for $106.5 million in 2010—then the record for a painting purchased at auction. The five-foot-by-four-foot painting is a portrait of Picasso’s blonde mistress lying on a sofa behind a dark blue curtain. The bidding began at $58 million, and its worth was estimated to be somewhere between $70 million and $90 million. The piece was previously owned by Frances Brody, who rarely loaned it out to museums. She and her husband bought the painting in 1951 and only showed it once in the U.S., in 1961.
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In 2012, Edvard Munch’s The Scream went for a staggering $119.9 million. The iconic painting, which depicts a man holding his face and screaming, is one of the most famous artworks in the world, with appearances in several movies and featured on mugs, posters, and T-shirts.
Cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder wanted Gustav Klimt’s 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer so badly he forked over $135 million for the masterpiece in 2006. At the time, it highest amount ever paid for a painting. For years, the Austrian government and Bloch-Bauer’s niece fought over who owned the painting. Maria Altmann said the work, along with four others, was taken by the Nazis during World War II. She was eventually awarded the paintings. Lauder, a former ambassador to Austria, founded the Neue Galerie, a museum in New York concentrating on German and Austrian art.
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Willem de Kooning’s Woman III sold for $137.5 million in 2006 to hedge-fund billionaire Steven Cohen. The 1952-53 piece was previously owned by David Geffen, who sold off several pieces of his private collection right around the time it was said he was mulling buying the Los Angeles Times. Woman III is considered one of the most important postwar paintings not hanging in a museum. Geffen acquired the painting, which depicts a nude female form with a toothy smile and oversize hands, in 1994 from a museum in Tehran. The deal went down on the tarmac at the Vienna airport, and Iran received a 16th-century religious manuscript.
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In 2013, a silkscreen print of Andy Warhol's Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), with multiple photos of the aftermath of a car which collided into a tree, sold for $104.5 million at Sotheby's auction. The print is part of Warhol's "Death and Disaster" series and was only expexted to fetch as much as $80 million, which would have still established a new record for the pop artist. The Daily Beast compiles a list of some of the most expensive art in the world.
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Hollywood mogul David Geffen owned the drip painting, known for its intense yellow, red, and brown colors, until it sold for $140 million to David Martinez, a Mexican financier, who spent about $90 million less on a two-floor apartment in New York City’s Time Warner building. The painting is one of Pollock’s larger pieces, measuring roughly four by eight feet. Geffen purchased the work of art from S.I. Newhouse, the publishing tycoon.
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Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucien Freud sold for $142.4 million in 2013 to an anonymous bidder after an intense ten minute battle between six others collectors. The triptych, which depicts Freud—Bacon's friend and rival—sitting in a chair from three separate angles, was originally estimated to sell for $85 million. Here, a member of the Christie's staff walks towards the high-priced artwork.
The most expensive painting of all time is Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players. The nation of Qatar, a tiny, oil-rich country just off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, purchased the painting in February for more than $250 million. That was double the price of the previous record for a piece of art. There are four other Card Players by Cézanne across the globe: at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musee d’Orsay, the Courtauld, and the Barnes Foundation. The painting was previously owned by Greek shipping magnate George Embiricos, who rarely loaned it out and didn’t think about selling it until shortly before his death in 2011.
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