Yesterday the record for the most expensive painting ever sold was broken. At Christie's in New York Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi the hammer was knocked down on a price of $450 million. It's a lot of money, period, and even more for a painting which some doubt is by Leonardo at all. One doubter insists that Leonardo the great scientist would have refracted the light through the orb in Christ's hands. That won't bother the buyer, whose identity is unknown.
Salvator Mundi soars to the top of the list of the 75 most expensive paintings sold in the last 30 years. The recent Leonardo discovery was already on the list at no 19, having sold for $131.1 million in 2012. It now soars high above Willem De Kooning's Interchange ($300 million, sold 2015). Salvator Mundi is also the earliest work in the list. The newest is Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled, painted in 1982 ($110.5 million, 2017).
This list is based on prices at current values calculated by Wikipedia. It strays back three decades to the purchase of two Van Goghs. The big market surge came in 1989 when the record for an old master – Pontormo's Portrait of a Halberdier – was sold to the Getty Museum for what is now $68 million. The 1990s was a fallow decade in which only two painters could command high prices: Van Gogh (four entries) and Picasso (two). In 2006 the market suddenly rose for post-war work by De Kooning, Johns and Pollock. That year three paintings were sold for the equivalent of more than $160 million.
While paintings continued to go for eye-watering sums, the record held until 2011 when Cézanne’s The Card Players was sold for $259 million. The market has been at its most obscenely inflated in recent years. Seven of the top 75 sales happened in 2012, five in 2013, six in 2014, nine in 2015, five in 2016, and two this year (the other entry for 2017 is Roy Lichtenstein's Masterpiece.) The overwhelming majority of these works ended up in private hands.
The artists with the most entries hold few surprises. Picasso: 13. Van Gogh: eight. Warhol: seven. Rothko: six. De Kooning: four. Cézanne, Modigliani, Titian, Bacon: three. Johns, Monet, Lichtenstein, Klimt, Pollock, Newman: two.
Below is the list of the top, while the gallery overleaf shows some of the top 75, leading towards the most expensive in history.
- Leonardo da Vinci: Salvator Mundi - $131.1m, sold 2012 De Kooning: Interchange - $300m, sold 2015
- Gauguin: Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?) - $300m, sold 2015
- Cézanne: The Card Players - $259m, sold 2011
- Pollock: Number 17A - $202m, sold 2015
- Rothko: No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red) - $188m, sold 2014
- Rembrandt: Pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit - $182m, sold 2015
- Picasso: Les Femmes d'Alger ("Version O") - $181.2m, sold 2012
- Modigliani: Nu Couché - $172.2m, sold 2015
- Pollock: No. 5, 1948 - $166.3m, sold 2006
- De Kooning: Woman III - $163.4m, sold 2006
- Klimt: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I - $160.4m, sold 2006
- Picasso: Le Rêve - $159.4m, sold 2013
- Van Gogh: Portrait of Dr. Gachet - $151.2m, sold 1990
- Klimt: Adele Bloch-Bauer II - $150m, sold 2016
- Lichtenstein: Masterpiece - $150m, sold 2017
- Bacon: Three Studies of Lucian Freud - $146.4m, sold 2013
- Renoir: Bal du moulin de la Galette - $143.2m, sold 1990
- Picasso: Garçon à la pipe - $132.1m, sold 2004
- Munch: The Scream - $125.1m, sold 2012
- Modigliani: Reclining Nude With Blue Cushion - $123m, sold 2012
- Johns: Flag - $120.8m, sold 2010
- Picasso: Nude, Green Leaves and Bust - $116.9m, sold 2010
- Van Gogh: Portrait of Joseph Roulin - $115.9m, sold 1989
- Van Gogh: Irises - $113.6m, sold 1987
- Picasso: Dora Maar au Chat - $113.1m, sold 2006
- Warhol: Eight Elvises - $111.2m, sold 2008
- Basquiat: Untitled - $110.5m, sold 2017
- Newman: Anna's Light - $108.7m, sold 2013
- Warhol: Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) - $108.4m, sold 2013
- Van Gogh: Portrait de l'artiste sans barbe - $105.1m, sold 1998
- Cézanne: La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue du bosquet du Château Noir - $103m, sold 2013
- Rubens: Massacre of the Innocents - $102.1m, sold 2002
- Lichtenstein: Nurse - $96.4m, sold 2016
- Bacon: Triptych, 1976 - $96m, sold 2008
- Picasso: Les Noces de Pierrette - $95.3m, sold 1905
- Johns: False Start - $95m, sold 2006
- Van Gogh: A Wheatfield with Cypresses - $94.5m, sold 1993
- Picasso: Yo, Picasso - $92.5m, sold 1989
- Warhol: Turquoise Marilyn - $92.4m, sold 2007
- Titian: Portrait of Alfonso d'Avalos, Marquis of Vasto, in Armour with a Page - $91.1m, sold 2003
- Rothko: Orange, Red, Yellow - $90.6m, sold 2012
- Monet: Le Bassin aux Nymphéas - $89.6m, 2008
- Cézanne: Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier - $87m, 1989
- Newman: Black Fire I - $85.1m, 2014
- Rothko: White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) - $84.1m, 200
- Van Gogh: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers - $83.6m, 1987
- Warhol: Triple Elvis - $82.9m, 2014
- Warhol: Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) - $82.8m, 2007
- Rothko: No 10 - $82.8, sold 2015
- Monet: Meule - $81.4m, sold 2016
- Bacon: Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards - $81.7m, 2014
- Holbein: Darmstadt Madonna - est. $80m, 2011
- Titian: Diana and Actaeon - $78.8m, 2009
- Picasso: Au Lapin Agile - $78.6m, 1989
- Eakins: The Gross Clinic - $78.5m, 2007
- Rothko: No 1 (Royal Red and Blue) - $78.4m, 2012
- Picasso: Acrobate et jeune arlequin - $78m, 1988
- Picasso: Femme aux bras croisés - $76.5m, 2000
- Modigliani: Nude Sitting on a Divan ("La Belle Romaine") $75.7m, 2010
- De Kooning: Police Gazette - $75.4m, 2006
- Titian: Diana and Callisto - $74.8m, 2012
- Twombly: Untitled (New York City) - $71.3m, 2015
- Picasso: Femme assise dans un jardin - $71.2m, 1999
- Van Gogh: Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat - $70.9m, 1997
- Twombly: Untitled - $70.4m, 2014
- Warhol: Four Marlons - $70.4m, 2014
- Qi Baishi: Eagle Standing on Pine Tree - $69.7, 2011
- Warhol: Men in Her Life - $69.6m, 2010
- Picasso: La Gommeuse - $68.2m, 2015
- Picasso: Buste de femme (Femme à la résille) - $68.1m, 2015
- Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier - $68m, 1989
- Van Gogh: L’Allée des Alyscamps - $67m, 2015
- De Kooning: Untitled XXV - $66.3m, 2016
- Rothko: Untitled - $67m, 2016
Overleaf: browse a gallery of the world's most expensive paintings
With its striking design, characteristically restricted palette and fluent use of line, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, 1831, is one of the world’s most recognisable images, encapsulating western ideas about Japanese art. First seen outside Japan in the 1880s, Van Gogh was one of the first Europeans to really engage with the print, and he was one of a number of 19th-century artists who tried to incorporate aspects of Japanese style into their work.
At heart, Photo London is a selling fair for expensive photographic prints. You wander through the steamy labyrinth of Somerset House from gallery show to gallery show surrounded by black-clad snapperati, assaulted on all sides by images until lost in photography. This year the show is said to be the subject of a "rigorous curatorial process" designed to show rare historical treasures, new work by established masters, and work by the brightest new stars.
I have always felt very lucky to have been working as an artist in London during the period when it transformed into the capital of the art world. It has been a beautiful, fascinating and profitable ride. When I started art school in 1978, contemporary art in Britain seemed like a cottage industry situated in some little backwater seldom visited by the public or the media.
These photographs of sand dunes were taken by Brian David Stevens in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, along a stretch of pristine Scottish coastline. The pictures themselves, while captivating and beautiful in their own right, also have political freight. For it is dunes such as these over which a long and ugly battle raged for several years.
The fifth edition of the highly popular Frieze Masters – the quieter sibling of the boisterous contemporary Frieze Art Fair London – is underway in Regent's Park, London. This year, the fair features 133 leading galleries from around the world. Their various displays include curated and created sections as well as solo exhibitions devoted to the works of artists such as Paula Rego (Malborough Fine Art, London), Robert Motherwell (Bernard Jacobsen Gallery, London), Lynn Chadwick (BlainSouthern, London) and Eduardo Paolozzi (Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London).
Nous avons Brexité but we are still welcome at the 47th Rencontres d'Arles. Each summer this beautiful French town gives itself over to an international photography festival which this year features around 40 exhibitions of varying sizes with countless lectures, parties, book signings and fringe events.
Arts festivals the size of the Venice Biennale are inevitably patchy. The appointed directors are hardly ever given enough time to curate and fill absolutely vast volumes of space. They can exhort the many national and individual participants to follow their lead, and yet they have no editorial control over them. And so for this year’s architecture biennale, with its theme of social responsibility – Reporting from the Front – set by director Alejandro Aravena, consider the newly-built Australian pavilion. This proudly features a swimming pool.
In a gallery darkened to evoke the seabed that was its resting place for over a thousand years, the colossal figure of Hapy, the Egyptian god of the Nile flood, greets visitors just as it met sailors entering the busy trading port of Thonis-Heracleion some 2,000 years ago. One of the largest objects ever loaned to the British Museum, Hapy symbolises the prosperity bestowed upon Egypt by the river Nile, but whose waters ultimately brought about the destruction of the ancient cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion, which subsided into the sea in the 8th century AD.