Back in 1964, Pablo Picasso never could have known that Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust), a painting he created in just one day that year, would end up being the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction to date. In May of 2010, Christie’s auctioneer Christopher Burge coaxed bidders to new heights and unloaded the piece for a cool $106.4 million.
Picasso’s dashed-off composition may be the priciest yet, but it’s far from the only one for which a collector has forked over an astronomical sum at auction in the past two decades. Below, the seven works closest on the heels of the new record-setter.
1. Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man I
Giacometti originally cast this bronze sculpture of a six-foot-tall man midstride in 1960, as part of a commission (which he later abandoned) from Chase Manhattan Bank to create a few such figures for the bank’s Pine Street plaza in New York City. In February 2010, just four months before Nude, Green Leaves and Bust nosed it out, Walking Man I sold for $104.3 million in a Sotheby’s London showroom. Ten bidders competed for the piece; the anonymous winner placed the final bid by telephone.
2. Pablo Picasso, Garçon à la Pipe (Boy with a Pipe)
Photo source: Wikipedia
Picasso was only twenty-four years old when he painted this seated portrait of a Parisian boy holding a pipe and wearing a crown of flowers. The work, part of the artist’s Rose Period collection, was first bought by John Hay Whitney, a U.S. ambassador to the UK, in 1950, for $30,000; then, in May 2004, it fetched $104.2 million from an unnamed collector at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City. Following the transaction, some art critics expressed skepticism about Garçon à la Pipe’s high price, which they believed was largely the result of Picasso’s overall prestige, rather than the painting’s technical and creative merit. Speaking to the Washington Post, Picasso expert Pepe Karmel said, “I’m stunned that a pleasant, minor painting could command a price appropriate to a real masterwork by Picasso. This just shows how much the marketplace is divorced from the true values of art.” Ouch.
3. Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar au Chat (Dora Maar with Cat)
Photo source: Wikipedia
When Picasso was fifty-five, he fell in love with a thirty-six-year-old French artist named Dora Maar, who became his live-in lover, intellectual equal, and muse for ten years. She also assisted Picasso in executing his seminal antiwar painting, Guernica, and produced a photo-documentary of the process. This 1941 portrait of Maar, in Picasso’s signature cubist style, is one of many that Picasso created of his mistress during her relationship, but it stands out for its three-quarter-length depiction of the subject, its complex detailing, and its vibrant palette. The work changed hands several times between its inception and May 2006, when an unknown, reputedly novice Russian bidder paid $95.2 million to take it off Sotheby’s hands in New York City.
4. Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II
Photo source: Wikimedia Commons
Austrian symbolist Klimt, a founding member of the Vienna Secession—a movement, begun in 1897, to break away from traditional Austrian art techniques—created two commissioned portraits of the wife of industrialist and art patron Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer in Vienna; with this piece, which Klimt completed in 1912, Adele became the only model whom the artist painted twice. In November 2006 in New York City, this second portrait went for $87.9 million at a Christie’s auction of impressionist and modern art; the total price of all the art sold that night was a staggering $491.4 million, the highest sum to change hands at an auction to date.
5. Francis Bacon, Triptych 1976
Art-world dark lord Francis Bacon, an Irish-born Brit whose work was the highest-priced of any living painter’s in the world in the 1980s, is best known for his representations of abstract, often grotesque, tormented-looking figures and heads set against simple backgrounds. Triptychs were Bacon’s favorite format in which to work; he completed thirty-three large ones over the course of three decades (and subsequently destroyed several). This immense 1976 example of that period, each individual panel of which measures five by six and a half feet, depicts a trio of seated figures whose insides appear to be spilling onto the table before them, and is commonly interpreted as an expression of Bacon’s inner turmoil. In May 2008, Triptych 1976 sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City for $86.3 million, assuring countless worried art dealers and institutions that some commodities are indeed recession-proof.
6. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet
Photo source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1890, van Gogh painted two similar likenesses of Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, the physician who cared for him during his final months of life, leaning on a table and wearing what the artist called “the heartbroken expression of our time.” Considered the apex of van Gogh’s portraiture, the original version of the painting—of which Vincent wrote to his brother: “Sad but gentle, yet clear and intelligent, that is how many portraits ought to be done … There are modern heads that may be looked at for a long time, and that may perhaps be looked back on with longing a hundred years later”—became the subject of much controversy beginning in May 1990, when Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito paid $82.5 million for it at a Christie’s auction in New York City. Following the purchase, Saito stashed the painting inside a climate-controlled vault for the next seven years, threatening (in jest, he later claimed) to cremate it with his body upon his death. When Saito did pass away in 1996, penniless and physically disabled, Portrait of Dr. Gachet never turned up, despite the dogged efforts of museum curators and auction houses to locate it; its whereabouts remain unknown.
7. August Renoir, Bal du Moulin de la Galette
Photo source: Wikimedia Commons
Considered one of the great masterpieces of the impressionist oeuvre, this 1876 painting (also known simply as Le Moulin de la Galette) captures the essence of Sunday afternoons at Moulin de la Galette, a historic windmill featuring a drinking-and-dancing establishment, in Paris’s Montmartre district. A large version of the painting currently hangs in the Musée d’Orsay; Renoir also created a smaller rendition, which John Hay Whitney (who also owned Picasso’s Garçon à la Pipe) purchased originally; in May 1990, Whitney’s widow sold the piece for $78.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York City, to Ryoei Saito, the same controversial collector who won the bid for Portrait of Dr. Gachet. When Saito fell into financial ruin, bankers used the painting as collateral for loans and arranged for it to be sold to an anonymous buyer—rumored to be a Swiss patron—through Sotheby’s.
What Recession?
While some fabulously wealthy individuals spend their money snapping up real estate all over the world or taking extravagant vacations, others prefer to travel back in time by turning their homes into private museums. The thought of spending $100 million on a single work of art is unfathomable for most of us, but if you had a few billion dollars to blow, wouldn’t you love to have a couple of Renoirs or Picassos hanging in your living room? As time goes on, the paintings listed above will drop lower and lower on the list of the most expensive pieces sold at art auctions in the United States, but for the collectors who purchased them and enjoy them every day, they’re the investment of a lifetime.
