Let’s try to make a list on the 7 most expensive paintings ever sold, we have been surfing the internet to find the most precise information but we assume that this information may change in a while. It’s important to tell you that we’re including paintings sold in auctions and private selling too. So get amazed: we´ve done it.
Our list starts with “The card players” by the postimpressionist French painter Paul Cézanne. It was sold in 2011 to the Qatar Royal family on 191 million Euros.
This is the last version of a 5 series paintings on cards games. It’s a work geometrically defined, what gives the characters a classical dignity, furthermore, their faces’ intensity clearly shows the post-impresionist age in which the painting was created.
The second position is for the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the painting is “The Dream”, an oil on canvas sold in 2013 to Steven Cohen, Wall Street magnate whose millionaire invest fund SAC allows him to buy art to unsuspected limits. The (damaged) painting was sold on 155 million dollars.
This masterpiece represents a woman in an armchair with her head lying backward, the face in two parts and with the bust on sight. The model is Marie-Thérèse Walter.
For “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” by the Irish painter Francis Bacon is the third position and it is the most expensive contemporary art masterpiece sold in an auction ever.
It’s an oil on canvas painted in triptych shape in 1969, which represents the artist Lucian Freud in several perspectives. It was sold at Christie’s in november 2013 to an anonymous buyer on 142 million dollars.
In the middle of our list, we find the American Jackson Pollock with his painting “Number 5, 1948”. Pollock, with Mark Rothko (you can find here our post on his work and life) and Willem de Kooning, is considered one of the great masters in the abstract expresionism movement.
The work we’re speaking about today was sold at Sotheby’s on 140 million dollars in November 2006 to the mexican financier David Martínez Guzman.
The fifth position is “Woman III” by Willem de Kooning. It was sold just a couple of days after “Number 5, 1948” and reached the record figure of 137.5 million dollars. The masterpiece was sold by the same owner of the Pollock mentioned above and purchased by the buyer of “The Dream”, the big collectionist Steven Cohen.
The sale of this abstract art representative piece came to add one more point in the big growth of the economic value of this artistic movement.
Position number six, now we find the extremely well-known Austrian simbolist artist Gustav Klimt and his work “Adele Bloch-Bauer”. Sold on 135 millions dollars to Ronald Lauder, the owner of Neue Galerie owner in New York. It was in June 2006.
The painting was made with and elaborated and complex decoration in oil and gold on canvas. The work was done in Viena, ordered by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer making Adele the only woman twice portraited by Klimt.
In the last but not least position in today´s list, we have “The Scream” by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, painting we already devoted a complete article you can find here.
This piece is worldwide recognized, an icon in the expresionist movement and it survives all over the times involved in a mistery provoked by the uncertainty of his meaning and by the dreadful life of the autor.
This piece is worldwide recognized, an icon in the expresionist movement and it survives all over the times involved in a mistery provoked by the uncertainty of his meaning and by the dreadful life of the autor.
“The Scream” is the most colouristic among the four versions the artist made about the same theme, and it’s the one and only that remains in private hands. It was sold at Sotheby’s in 2012, purchased by an unknown buyer at 119 million dollars price.
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Watercolors by Soraya Estefana in shop and full screen slide gallery.Click on pictures to go to work file
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