Has the first billion-dollar painting already been made?
The price an artwork meets at auction is not a reflection of its inherent quality (if such a thing could ever even be measured) but instead the result of trends in the famously capricious art market.
Ever since I became an art dealer back in 2016, I’ve been interested in the rising prices of blue-chip artworks. My team and I were gathered around a laptop watching the auction for the Salvator Mundi in 2017. This incredible half-a-billion-dollar price tag got me thinking about which painting would be the first to reach a billion dollars.
The World’s Most Expensive Paintings
To refresh, let’s look at the current top 10 most expensive paintings sold:
Title, Artist, and Date — Price sold* — Year sold
Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci (attr.), c. 1500 — $450.3 million — 2017
Interchange, Willem de Kooning, 1955 — $300 million — 2015
The Card Players, Paul Cezanne, 1892–93 — $250 million+ — 2011
Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), Paul Gauguin, 1892, — $210 million — 2014
Number 17A, Jackson Pollock, 1948, — $210 million — 2015
