I have been tracking the mega-prices paid at auction for paintings since Top 10 of Everything began back in 1989, when Van Gogh’s Irises, which had sold two years earlier for $53.9 million, held the record. Now, that sort of price wouldn’t get anywhere near the Top 10, the latest version of which I have just compiled and looks like this:
| Artist/ painting/ sale year | Price ($) | |
| 1 | Pablo Picasso, Garçon à la pipe, 2004 | 104,168,000 |
| 2 | Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar au chat, 2006 | 95,216,000 |
| 3 | Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, 2006 | 87,936,000 |
| 4 | Francis Bacon, Triptych, 2008 | 86,281,000 |
| 5 |
Vincent van Gogh, Portrait du Dr Gachet, 1990 | 82,500,000 |
| 6 | Claude Monet, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, 2008 | 80,379,591 |
| 7 | Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bal au Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, 1990 | 78,100,000 |
| 8 | Sir Peter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents, 2002 | 75,930,440 |
| 9 | Mark Rothko, White Center (Yellow, pink and lavender on rose), 2007 | 72,840,000 |
| 10 | Andy Warhol, Green Car Crash – Green Burning Car I, 2007 | 71,720,000 |
Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich was revealed as the buyer of Francis Bacon’s Triptych. The price he paid is a record for a post-war painting. The previous day he had purchased Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping for $33.6 million, a record price for a work by a living artist.
Even higher prices are reputed to have been paid for works of art sold privately. Such sales are rarely publicized, but it is believed that in 2006 US music mogul David Geffen sold Jackson Pollock’s No.5, 1948 for $140 million.
A private sale that never happened was that of Pablo Picasso’s painting Le rêve. Its owner, Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn, agreed to sell it privately for $139 million, but while showing it to a group of friends, Mr Wynn made a sweeping gesture and accidentally poked his elbow through the canvas, resulting in a 15-cm (6-inch) tear – and the cancellation of the sale.
