Most Expensive Paintings Ever Sold

Some masterpieces fetch incredible prices on the open market.
Whether it’s via auction or private sales, artworks by big-name painters have drawn record-breaking prices in recent years. Some buyers are billionaire art collectors seeking a trophy piece to hang in their mansion. Others are investors with eyes on resale profit. And then there are art museums, banking that adding a Picasso or Warhol to their gallery will bring in the crowds.
This list includes only the most expensive paintings ever sold, not the world’s most valuable paintings. Though artworks are assessed for insurance purposes, there’s truly no way to put a monetary value on the “Mona Lisa,” which is considered priceless.
The paintings are ranked by the original sale price in U.S. dollars. If the amounts were to be adjusted for inflation, the list would look similar with only a few pieces changing position. And the top five would remain as is.
25. Nude, Green Leaves and Bust

Artist: Pablo Picasso
Year sold: 2010
Price: $106.5 million (auction)
Bottom Line: Nude, Green Leaves and Bust

Measuring more than 5-feet tall, this bold portrait of Picasso’s mistress Marie Therese-Walter may have been lost forever if not for the artist’s Parisian friend and art dealer, Paul Rosenberg.
In the late 1930s, sensing the onset of World War II, he shipped the painting out of France to New York, rescuing it from Nazi looting.
The work’s current owner is one of the U.K.’s wealthiest men, Sir Leonard Blavatnik, who has semi-permanently loaned the painting to London’s Tate Modern gallery.
24. Flag

Artist: Jasper Johns
Year sold: 2010
Price: $110 million (estimated amount, private sale)
Bottom Line: Flag

Jasper Johns’s rendering of the American flag garnered the highest price ever paid for a painting by a living artist.
In 1954, recently discharged from the U.S. Army, conceptual artist Johns had a dream about the flag that inspired him to create a series of encaustic paintings, in which melted, colored beeswax is used as paint. In the case of “Flag,” the red, white and blue wax was applied to board-mounted collages of newspaper clippings.
Sounds like a simple idea, but this seminal work of the so-called “Neo-Dada” movement would go on to inspire, for better or worse, generations of pop artists.
This version of “Flag,” purchased by uber collector Steven A. Cohen, was created in 1958. If you’d like to admire the original 1954 entry in the series, it hangs in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.