Art can be viewed simultaneously as an investment and as a source of personal comfort and enjoyment; but what is the most important criterion for appreciating and evaluating a work of art? This mind boggling question is not an easy one to answer; art connoisseurs mostly evaluate works of art on the basis of aesthetic conclusions, but art collectors focus on both content and formal qualities while analyzing a work of art. The arguments for and against a painting's prospects offer valuable insight both to the quality of the painting itself and to the hidden machinations of the art market. Quite often the state of the art market, rather than the aesthetic value of an artwork, influences our assessment of a work’s aesthetic merit. Relatively limited supply of prestige artworks are quasi trophies for the tycoons, who became the leading worldwide consumers of the fine arts through their avid collecting habits, spending seemingly endless funds amassing private art collections. Millions of dollars are changing hands in two venerable auction houses; Christie's and Sotheby's, which together control 95% of worldwide fine art auction sales. If the rumors circulating the art world about the most expensive art purchase in history are true, No. 5, 1948 is now the most expensive painting ever sold, allegedly by entertainment mogul David Geffen to the Mexican financier David Martinez.

Most Expensive Paintings in the World
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Last Updated: January 23, 2007

No. 5, 1948 - Jackson Pollock, 1948

oil, enamel and aluminum paint on fiberboard - 4' x 8' (130 x 260 cm)

sold for $140,000,000 on Nov 2, 2006 by David Geffen to David Martinez

An unusually large, densely tangled composition in browns and yellows, forming a nest-like appearance. No. 5, 1948 is part of a series the New York expressionist created in the 1940s in his trademark "drip and splash' style for which he is best known emerged with some abruptness in 1947. Instead of using the traditional easel he affixed his canvas to the floor or the wall and poured and dripped his paint from a can; instead of using brushes he manipulated it with `sticks, trowels or knives' (to use his own words), sometimes obtaining a heavy impasto by an admixture of `sand, broken glass or other foreign matter'. This manner of Action painting had in common with Surrealist theories of automatism that it was supposed by artists and critics alike to result in a direct expression or revelation of the unconscious moods of the artist.
Pollock's name is also associated with the introduction of the All-over style of painting which avoids any points of emphasis or identifiable parts within the whole canvas and therefore abandons the traditional idea of composition in terms of relations among parts. The design of his painting had no relation to the shape or size of the canvas; indeed in the finished work the canvas was sometimes docked or trimmed to suit the image.

Woman III - Willem de Kooning, 1952-53

oil on canvas - 68" x 48" (173 x 122 cm)

sold for $137,500,000 on Nov 16, 2006 by David Geffen to Steven A. Cohen

The female figure was a theme to which de Kooning returned repeatedly. Whereas de Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s and again from 1947 to 1949, and the biomorphic shapes of his early abstractions can be interpreted as female symbols, it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the subject of women exclusively. The savagely applied pigment and the use of colours that seem vomited on his canvas combine to reveal a woman all too congruent with some of modern man's most widely held sexual fears. The toothy snarls, overripe, pendulous breasts, gigantic, vacuous eyes, and blasted extremities imaged the darkest Freudian insights.
“Woman III” is one of six “Woman” paintings he numbered; the only work from Kooning's "Women" series still in private hands.

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As the leading exponent of Viennese Jugendstil in painting, Klimt’s most memorable works included his dazzling portraits of Vienna’s leading society ladies, many of whom were Jewish. One of the best known of these is his magnificent 1907 painting, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, portraying the wife of the industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Foremost among the rare “gold style” works, the painting captures its elegant and intelligent subject as the ideal of feminine beauty. The figure dissolves into sumptuous patterning reminiscent of the Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna, Italy, portraying the Empress Theodora, which Klimt had visited in 1903.
Klimt’s fine craftsmanship in this work is evident in his varied uses of real gold: as a diffuse background luster reminiscent of Japanese lacquer, as the fabric of a flowing gown, and as a pattern punctuated with Egyptian god’s-eye motifs. In contrast with this rich decorative treatment, Adele’s face stands out as an extraordinarily modern psychological portrayal, while her hands are arranged gracefully to conceal a deformed finger. Self-assured yet introspective, she comports herself as a woman of privilege devoted to the world of the intellect.
Adele Bloch-Bauer I is a singular work representing the climax of this stylistic development, providing us with a unique and intimate glimpse of an artist’s personal admiration made manifest - a painted eulogy of a distinguished and enlightened patroness of Austrian culture during its heyday

One of the iconic images of the Blue and Rose periods, Garçon à la pipe (Boy with a pipe), is a masterpiece of Picasso's early years and the finest painting of that era remaining in private hands. This extraordinary work probably began as a study from life in Picasso's immediate surroundings but was dramatically transformed in a moment of sudden inspiration.
According to André Salmon: 'After a delightful series of metaphysical acrobats, dances like priestesses of Diana, delightful clowns and `wistful Harlequins,' Picasso had painted, without a model, the purest and simplest image of a young Parisian working boy, beardless and in blue overalls: having indeed, more or less the same appearance as the artist himself during working hours. One night, Picasso abandoned the company of his friends and their intellectual chit-chat. He returned to his studio, took the canvas he had abandoned a month before and crowned the figure of the little apprentice lad with roses. He had made this work a masterpiece thanks to a sublime whim."
Picasso's work of the Rose period has always been admired for its melancholy charm and haunting poetry, contrasting with the deep gloom of the immediately preceding Blue period, yet in both instances the source of inspiration was in his immediate surroundings. Since 1904, he had been living in the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre. Although the model for the present work has sometimes been identified as an actor, it seems likely that he was an adolescent known as 'p'tit Louis,' who was frequently to be found at the Bateau Lavoir along with, in Picasso's own words, other `local types, actors, ladies, gentlemen, delinquents. He stayed there, sometimes the whole day. He watched me work. He loved that.'
A number of preliminary studies for the present painting show Picasso depicting his model in a variety of different positions, standing, sitting, leaning against a wall, lighting a pipe or simply holding it in his hands. This remarkable painting differs radically from any of the preliminary studies, transforming the young boy who might light his pipe into a slightly more a mature adolescent who gazes absently into space. Even before the addition of the garland of flowers, any trace of the anecdotal had been removed. The pipe in held in the left hand with the stem pointing away from the youthful smoker, as an emblem of maturity, perhaps, rather than a purveyor of tobacco smoke...

Dora Maar au chat is one of Picasso’s most spectacular depictions of his mistress and artistic companion. Picasso's love affair with Maar (1907-1997) was a partnership of intellectual exchange and intense passion that lasted nearly a decade, and Maar’s influence on the artist resulted in some of his most daring portraits of his career. Among the best of them are the oils completed during the war years, when Picasso's art resonated with the drama and emotional upheaval of the era.
The luminous Dora Maar au chat was painted in 1941, at the beginning of the Second World War in France and just as the couple's relationship was reaching its fiery climax. This large canvas is one of the most complete and compositionally dynamic depictions from an elite group of portraits from the late 1930s and early 1940s.
The story of Dora Maar’s relationship with Picasso is legendary in the history of 20th century art. Picasso met Maar, the Surrealist photographer, in the fall of 1935 and was enchanted by the young woman’s powerful sense of self and commanding presence. Although still involved with Marie-Thérèse Walter and still married to Olga Khokhlova at the time, Picasso became intimately involved with Maar by the end of the year, and by 1937 she had ascended to the status of the artist's primary mistress. Unlike the docile and domestic Marie-Thérèse who had given birth to their daughter Maya in 1935, Maar was an artist, spoke Picasso’s native Spanish, and shared his intellectual and political concerns. She even assisted with the execution of the monumental Guernica and produced the only photo-documentary of the work in progress. And as she was one of the most influential figures in his life during this time, she also became his primary model.
Looking back on the pictures that he painted of her, Picasso once admitted that Dora Maar had become for him the personification of the war. Her image, which he reinterpreted countless times between 1937 and 1944, embodied all of the complicated and conflicting emotions of life in the midst of occupied Paris. But what first caught Picasso's attention was Maar's transfixing beauty, which is not lost in the present picture and which James Lord described upon meeting Maar in 1944: "Her gaze possessed remarkable radiance but could also be very hard. I observed that she was beautiful, with a strong, straight nose, perfect scarlet lips, the chin firm, the jaw a trifle heavy and the more forceful for being so, rich chestnut hair drawn smoothly back, and eyelashes like the furred antennae of moths".
More than most of the women in his life thus far, Dora Maar was Picasso's intellectual equal – a characteristic that the artist found both stimulating and challenging. During the occupation and as tension mounted in their relationship Picasso would express his frustration by furiously abstracting her image, often portraying her in tears. While the present portrait is undeniably appealing and might seem a departure from Picasso's more hostile depictions of his model, it may be, in fact, one of his most brilliant and biting provocations of his Weeping Woman.
Picasso once likened Maar's allure and mercurial temperament to that of an "Afghan cat," and the cat in this picture resonates with meaning. In the history of art, the pairing of cats and women was an allusion to feminine wiles and sexual aggression. Surely this significance was not lost on Picasso, who had referenced the cat in some of his earliest and most recent compositions as symbol of women's sexual availability and animalistic nature. Moreover, the cat's inclusion here is yet another opportunity for Picasso to impose his predilections and control on his model.
James Lord tells us that after the death of Maar's beloved pet dog, Picasso insisted on replacing the animal with a cat. But Maar despised the creature, who was unfriendly and prone to vicious scratching.
It is interesting to consider, then, that here Picasso has paid particular attention to the sharp, talon-like nails on the figure’s long fingers. In life Maar’s well-manicured hands were one of her most beautiful and distinctive features, but here they have taken on another, more violent characteristic.
Considering the other portraits that he completed of her throughout the 1940s, Dora Maar au chat is a composition that Picasso never matched or attempted to revise.
Janis wrote about this picture in the context of the other portraits of Dora Maar that Picasso completed during the war, and reminded readers that, "it has been observed that Picasso never works directly from the model. His portraits are of persons remembered. They portray, through the instinct and vision, through the delicately balanced co-ordination of eye, mind, hand, and heart, a new realism reaching into the deepest recesses of man's inner nature. This is particularly true of Dora Maar au chat, for all of these portrayals, psychologically intense and penetrating, become increasingly so throughout the group. Characterized by the extreme eccentricity and psychopathic distortions of their personalities, the likenesses are visibly stamped with their traumatic scars".
Its symbolic significance notwithstanding, the present work is a picture of great compositional ingenuity. Dora Maar au chat was the most elaborate portrait of Dora that Picasso painted in 1941. In other depictions of her from the Spring and early Summer of 1941, he renders her with similarly sharp nails, but in no other picture from that year does he so generously embellish her image with ornamentation and color.
One of the rare, full portraits of Maar, the present work is also extraordinary for Picasso's attention to detail, right down to the polka dots on the figure's dress. The artist has not spared one inch of the canvas from his brush, using an extraordinarily vibrant palette in his rendering of the angles of the chair and the patterning of the figure’s dress. Although punctuated by planar elements, dots and stripes of bewildering variety constitute Dora and the chair on which she sits.
Discussing the use of stripes in Picasso’s work of this period, Brigitte Léal commented: “While in portraits of Marie- Thérèse stripes appear in a range of pastel colors that always have a summery and childlike connotation, in [the portraits] of Dora stripes proliferate until they cover the figure and the background entirely, becoming an eloquent statement of the intensely emotional character of her image. What is one to think of the meaning of this network of concentric lines that, not content to bud prettily on her clothes, begin progressively to invade every part of her body in order to end up covering her totally with a fine tattoo that transforms her into some barbarous idol?”.
The most embellished and the most symbolic element of the sitter’s wardrobe in this picture is the hat, Maar’s most famous accessory and signifier of her involvement in the Surrealist movement. Ceremoniously placed atop her head like a crown, it is festooned with colorful blossoms and outlined with a band of vibrant red.
In 1937 the critic Paul Eluard wrote about the symbolism of the hat, explaining its fetishistic importance within the Surrealist movement and shedding light on its role in Picasso’s paintings: “Among the objects tangled in the web of life, the female hat is one of those that require the most insight, the most audacity. A head must dare to wear a crown”.
Larger than life, an impression enhanced by her vibrant body that cannot be confined by the boundaries of the chair, Maar looms in this picture like a pagan goddess seated on her throne. As the artist was inspired by the beauty and charisma of his mistress, his paintings of this period focus almost exclusively on her rather than on the happenings of wartime France. Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar are renowned as the best paintings from the late 30s and early 40s. The artist once explained, “I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict”. However, the stress of war ultimately created a terrible strain on the artist’s relationship with Maar, and dramatic conflicts naturally arose between these two strong-willed personalities. Not surprisingly, the portraits of Dora contain, perhaps more than any other paintings from these years, a brilliant distillation of the “terrible beauty” of the times.
Brigitte Léal writes, “Their terribilità no doubt explains why the innumerable, very different portraits that Picasso did of [Dora] remain among the finest achievements of his art, at a time when he was engaged in a sort of third path, verging on Surrealist representation while rejecting strict representation and, naturally, abstraction. Today, more than ever, the fascination that the image of this admirable, but suffering and alienated, face exerts on us incontestably ensues from its coinciding with our modern consciousness of the body in its threefold dimension of precariousness, ambiguity, and monstrosity. There is no doubt that by signing these portraits, Picasso tolled the final bell for the reign of ideal beauty and opened the way of for the aesthetic tyranny of a sort of terrible and tragic beauty”.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II - Gustav Klimt, 1912

oil on canvas - 75" x 47" (190 x 120 cm)

sold for $87,936,000 on Nov 8, 2006

Gustav Klimt painted a second portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer five years after completing the first. Similarly disembodied yet unequivocally standing upright, the lady appears before a colorful background this time, one which could hardly be more different from the ‘golden shrine’ of the first portrait.
Klimt’s first-hand encounters with the works of the French avant-garde (through Secession exhibitions and during his trip to Paris in 1909) as well as his friendship with the young Egon Schiele had lastingly altered his relationship to color. However, despite all of these influences, Klimt acquired his very own way of employing it, as the portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer II of 1912 so spectacularly demonstrates. In three large and two small fields of color, Klimt fashions the background as surface and strata physically independent of the figure. Apparently floating, Adele fills her own pictorial plane. This floating character is heightened through the two-dimensional treatment of her body and her ankle-length silk stole, which traces and encompasses her contours with an opalescent radiance. The broad hat brim around her head is reminiscent of a halo. Should the green and blue fields in the lower background provoke involuntary associations with elements of a landscape (perhaps a view into a garden), any such illusion is disrupted by the depiction of Chinese horsemen in the upper part of the painting as this piece of chinoiserie is clearly indicative of an interior. This almost hallucinatory oscillation between the real and the visionary is fundamental to Klimt’s artistic vision and masterfully accomplished in this painting.
In any event, the artist’s main concern here appears to be the entelechy of an image, that a painting is a law unto itself, rather than experimenting with the confusion of spatial perception evident in his first portrait: it is as much the combination of the (unusual) colors as the harmony of the relationships between the fields of color that are exceptional, completely self-serving and independent. For the very last time before the collapse of the monarchy, the possibility of a pictorially immanent beauty reveals itself in Austrian art.
In his second portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, Gustav Klimt not only paved the way for other Austrian artists to reassess the contextualization of their sitters but, more importantly, he demonstrated the liberation of visualization by effortlessly assimilating a whole series of influences and reworking them into a peculiarly inspired personal vision.

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Portrait of Dr. Gachet - Vincent van Gogh, 1890

oil on canvas - 23.4" x 22" (67 x 56 cm)

sold for $82,500,000 on May 15, 1990 to Ryoei Saito

"I've done the portrait of M. Gachet with a melancholy expression, which might well seem like a grimace to those who see it. . . . Sad but gentle, yet clear and intelligent, that is how one ought to paint many portraits. . . . 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."

On June 1, Van Gogh began his first painting of Dr. Gachet. His portrait of this complex man, one of the most significant examples of the genre in Western art, represents the summary and culmination of all of Van Gogh's experiments with the modern portrait in the Midi. By this time, he had painted in the doctor's garden and had studied his art collection, which Vincent described to his brother as black antiquities, save Gachet's collection of Impressionist paintings.
Van Gogh was very intrigued by the personality and physical appearance of the doctor who practiced medicine in Paris several days a week, treating emotional as well as physical illnesses. His varied interests included homeopathy, electroshock therapy, and anthropology. His passion for the arts was well known in Paris, where he had gained recognition as an amateur engraver and philanthropist. His physical appearance was remarkable, even eccentric: a white cap often crowned his shock of flaming red hair as he breezed about town and worked in his vegetable and flower gardens, surrounded by various species of pets, including at least a dozen cats, five dogs, a goat, two peacocks, and a turtle. The lonely sixty-two-year-old widower lived with his seventeen-year-old son Paul, and twenty-one-year-old daughter Marguerite, in a walled property near Ravoux's inn.
In Gachet, Van Gogh recognized a kindred spirit--both physically and psychologically. When Vincent was still in Saint-Rémy, Theo had told his brother how Gachet reminded him of Vincent alluding chiefly to the red hair that the two men had in common. After meeting the doctor, Vincent recounted to his sister other similarities between them, including mental fragility and occasionally odd behavior. Van Gogh felt an affinity towards Dr. Gachet, particularly due to Gachet's physical appearance and occasional odd and nervous behavior. Van Gogh also identified with Gachet's immersion in his work as a way of alleviating his loneliness and melancholy. Van Gogh's first portrait was an etching of Dr. Gachet with his pipe. After lunching with his friend, he used Gachet's materials and equipment to produce the only etching he made in France. In the doctor's painted portrait, the artist sought to express "the impassioned expression of modern times," by means of intense color. He exaggerated the colors of the doctor's sunburned face and of his blue coat set against a cobalt blue background. For the doctor's portrait, however, the artist was less specific about the meaning of the color, and instead of cosmic images of stars, he painted the rolling hills of Auvers. Gachet's melancholy was an essential aspect of the man, and through the physicians' pose and agonized features Van Gogh synthesized what he described to Gauguin as "the heartbroken expression of our time." In the Midi, Vincent had discussed with Theo the mental suffering of people in modern society as a disease of the changing times. Van Gogh now posed Dr. Gachet as he had posed Mme Ginoux for L'Arlésienne, one of the paintings he had brought to Auvers.
On the red table in the doctor's portrait, Van Gogh placed other emblems of Gachet's melancholy spirit: a glass with sprigs of foxglove--a plant used in homeopathic medicine to treat melancholy--and next to it two French novels about modern life and mental suffering in Paris: Germinie Lacerteux (1864) and Manette Salomon (1867-68), written by the Goncourt brothers. "This is how one ought to paint many portraits," Vincent remarked to Wil. In his last portrait of a man, Van Gogh summarized the ideas on the modern portrait that had preoccupied him during his two years in the Midi. He wrote to Theo that the modern portrait, in this case, that of Dr. Gachet, greatly impassioned him. Color was central to creating the character of the sitter, so that future generations would view the sitter as if he were an apparition.

False Start - Jasper Johns, 1959

oil on canvas - 67.2" x 54" (170.8 x 137.2 cm)

sold for $80,000,000 on Oct 12, 2006 by David Geffen to Kenneth C. Griffin

False Start literalizes the conflict between words and images by writing the names of colors in the wrong color and associating the names with other wrong colors. But perhaps another sign of the "false start" is that this painting, unlike the earlier work in the 1950s, is not encaustic. Whereas the encaustic paintings froze the brushwork into icons of style, this painting gives us a more fluid image which almost suggests a poetic and romantic landscape painting, albeit considerably abstracted.

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Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre - Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876

oil on fabric - 51.6" x 69" (131 x 175 cm)

sold for $78,100,000 on May 17, 1990

One of the most famous impressionist works is Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette (Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette), often described as “the most beautiful painting of the 19th century”, an open-air scene, jammed with people, of a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre not far from where Renoir had been living.
The artist attains to reproduce to perfection the atmosphere of a popular dance hall. "Moulin de la Galette" is a canvas so rich in attractions, so full of enchanting details that it becomes nothing less than an affirmation of the goodness of living.
His picture of the Sunday afternoon dance in its acacia-shaded courtyard is one of his happiest compositions. In still-rural Montmartre, the Moulin, called 'de la Galette' (from the pancake which was its speciality), had a local clientele, especially of working girls and their young men together with a sprinkling of artists who, as Renoir did, enjoyed the spectacle and also found unprofessional models. In this masterpiece, Renoir also portrays many of his friends – as the Cuban painter Pedro Vidal and his partner, other French painters like Lamy, Gervex or Codey- spending a placid Sunday afternoon in the Moulin's garden. Artists, bohemians, prostitutes… all of them forming an authentic “human zoo” that transfers us to those bohemian afternoons in the 19th century Paris.

 Massacre of the Innocents - Peter Paul Rubens, 1611

oil on canvas - 56" x 71.6" (142 x 182 cm)

sold for £49,506,650 ($75,930,440) on Jul 10, 2002 to Kenneth Thomson

This is one of the most brutal episodes in biblical history. Herod's soldiers have been ordered to kill all new-born boys to stop one of them becoming a Messiah. The details here are compelling - the scratch on the soldier's cheek, the old woman biting, the bowed head of the mourning mother beside the heap of dead children. In this work, Rubens demonstrates the lessons he had learnt in Italy: his ability to paint the male nude, to handle compositions of great complexity, and portray a wide range of emotions - grief, violence and desperate love.

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