8 Record-Breaking Artworks and the Wild Prices They Fetched

Attributed — carefully, sometimes grudgingly — to Leonardo da Vinci, this small painting of Christ holding a glass orb sold at Christie’s in New York in November 2017 for $450.3 million. That’s not a typo, and it remains the most anyone has ever paid for a painting at auction, or anywhere else that we know of. The bidding ran nineteen minutes.

What makes it wild is that experts still argue about how much of it Leonardo actually painted. The picture was heavily damaged and heavily restored, and plenty of scholars think it’s mostly workshop or later hands. You paid nearly half a billion dollars, and you still can’t be entirely sure whose brush did the work. It has since more or less vanished from public view.

Willem de Kooning painted this jagged abstract in 1955. Sixty years later the hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin bought it privately from the David Geffen Foundation for a reported $300 million. On the same day, from the same seller, he also picked up a Jackson Pollock — the two together running him half a billion dollars in a single afternoon of shopping.

Because it was a private sale, that $300 million figure is the number everyone repeats but nobody at the table has ever confirmed for the record. It’s widely cited as the most expensive painting in the world, which is a strange kind of fame for a picture that changed hands with no auctioneer, no paddles, and no room full of witnesses.

Paul Cézanne painted five versions of two peasants hunched over a card table. Four of them hang in major museums. The fifth was the last one left in private hands, and around 2011 the royal family of Qatar bought it — reportedly for about $250 million, which briefly made it the priciest artwork on record.

“Reportedly” is doing heavy lifting there. The sale was private, the figure was first floated by Vanity Fair, and estimates have ranged as high as $300 million. What’s not in doubt is the buyer’s appetite: Qatar has spent years quietly assembling one of the most serious art collections on earth, one nine-figure cheque at a time.

Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian scene, Nafea Faa Ipoipo, is the cautionary tale of this whole list. In 2015 the press reported it had sold to Qatari buyers for close to $300 million — a new world record, everyone said, splashed across the headlines.

Then a lawsuit over the seller’s agent’s commission dragged the real paperwork into court, and it turned out the painting had actually gone for $210 million back in 2014. Still an enormous sum, but $90 million short of the myth. It’s a neat reminder that a lot of these “record” prices are built on rumor, and the rumor is often wrong in the seller’s favor.

This is the Jackson Pollock that rode along with the de Kooning in Kenneth Griffin’s $500 million double buy in 2015. A 1948 drip painting, all tangled skeins of poured color, it was reportedly valued at around $200 million in that private deal.

Pollock made these by laying the canvas on the floor and flinging paint at it, which critics of the day found ridiculous. He died in a car crash in 1956, broke by the standards of what his work now fetches. He never saw a fraction of a fraction of this, which is the quiet, uncomfortable thread running through most of these numbers.

Pablo Picasso painted a whole series riffing on Delacroix’s harem scene, labeling them A through O. Version O, the last and busiest of them, sold at Christie’s in May 2015 for $179.4 million — at the time a record for any painting at auction, and unlike most of this list, a public one you could actually watch happen.

The buyer was a former prime minister of Qatar (yes, them again). The nice bit of trivia: the same canvas had sold in 1997 for $31.9 million. Eighteen years later it went for more than five times that. Whatever else you think of the top of the art market, it has been a spectacular place to park money.

Jeff Koons cast a child’s inflatable bunny in mirror-polished stainless steel in 1986. In 2019 one of them sold at Christie’s for $91.1 million, setting the record for the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold at auction — a title Koons took back from David Hockney, who’d held it for all of six months.

It’s about three feet tall, faceless, and looks like a novelty balloon frozen mid-squeak. People love it and people find it maddening, often at the same time, which is roughly the point. That a shiny bunny can outbid actual old masters says something about where taste and money have wandered off to.

And then there’s the banana. Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian is, quite literally, a fresh banana duct-taped to a wall. It became an internet sensation in 2019, and in November 2024 Sotheby’s sold it for $6.2 million to a cryptocurrency founder who announced he’d pay in crypto and, at one point, ate the banana.

What you actually buy is a certificate and instructions — you supply your own banana and tape. It’s a fraction of the other prices here, but it’s the one people bring up at dinner, because it dares you to ask what you’re really paying for. Which, honestly, is a fair question to ask about this entire list.