What makes the most expensive paintings so expensive?

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":6.95,"text":"Casting her glittery light, Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I”, or the Lady in Gold, will still hang at the top of the grand staircase at New York’s Neue Galerie, but from 2028, following Ronald Lauder’s gift of his entire gallery, she will belong to the Metropolitan Museum."}],[{"start":24,"text":"It has been quite a journey. When Lauder paid $135mn for “Adele” in 2006 — then the record for any painting — Klimt wasn’t nearly as rated. Neither Ernst Gombrich’s foundational book The Story of Art nor Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New even mentioned him. There had been no comprehensive solo exhibition in a US or UK museum. Globally, Austrian and German art was overlooked in favour of Paris."}],[{"start":52.2,"text":"But money talks, gold shouts and a billionaire’s taste trumped traditional art hierarchies. Since 2006, six Klimt paintings have fetched more than $100mn, including last year with the sale of “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” ($236mn). Now Met director Max Hollein says, “If you look at Vienna 1900, Berlin 1920s — this was really the epicentre of the development of the avant-garde and it’s important to have a broad and deep collection there.”"}],[{"start":83.6,"text":"“Adele” was a turning point for more than Klimt’s fortunes. Within months of the sale, two private acquisitions — Willem de Kooning’s “Woman III” ($137mn) and Jackson Pollock’s “No 5, 1948” ($140mn) — also showed 20th-century paintings becoming the new trophies. Old Masters, then latterly Van Gogh, had long dominated the market’s upper level. Although the world’s most expensive painting is the controversial “Salvator Mundi” (experts at the Met and the Prado, for example, do not believe it is an entirely autograph Leonardo), it is an outlier. Today works from 1905 (Picasso) to 1983 (Basquiat) make up three-quarters of paintings sold over $100mn. Klimt, de Kooning, Modigliani, Pollock, Rothko, and Warhol are recurring names."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":137.6,"text":"Why this select band and not other equally dazzling artists? And does the global market, its high-profile sales broadcast on social media and mainstream news, shape wider cultural trends?"}],[{"start":149.04999999999998,"text":"“For collectors, owning and attaining and selling is validation,” Sotheby’s Europe chair Oliver Barker tells me. “A billionaire class with deep, deep pockets is now pursuing names as if they are brands.” "}],[{"start":161.64999999999998,"text":"He believes “we are at the beginning of a purple patch when a whole generation of postwar collectors are dying, so we’ll see more dynastic collections” — ensuring a good supply of mid-20th-century art, which that generation prioritised, with “provenances that pass the test”. In May, Christie’s sold Pollock’s breakthrough drip painting “Number 7A”, from media mogul SI Newhouse’s legendary collection, for $181mn. Warhol’s “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn”, which fetched $195mn in 2022, had also been owned by Newhouse, then in the distinguished Thomas Ammann collection. "}],[{"start":203.09999999999997,"text":"Both works are emblematic of American art’s postwar vitality and confidence, throwing off European influence. They are instantly recognisable — essential when buyers make rapid judgments based on jpegs — and distinctive, which is surely 20th-century painting’s major attraction: from the 1900s, personal style defined success. Not everyone can tell one Old Master from another, but we know a Picasso when we see one. Pollock’s all-over skeins of paint, Warhol’s silkscreened portraits, Rothko’s blurry rectangles, Modigliani’s willowy linearity and Klimt’s jewelled ornamentation are all unmistakable, self-assertive, attention-grabbing. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":245.54999999999995,"text":"It’s an intoxicating mix for today’s individualistic self-made billionaires, creating record prices. In 2014, Russian “fertiliser king” Dmitry Rybolovlev bought a Rothko for $186mn, and in 2015, American hedge fund manager Ken Griffin purchased a Pollock for $200mn. That year, Chinese stock trader and former taxi driver Liu Yiqian acquired Modigliani’s “Reclining Nude” for $170mn, taking flowers and champagne to the artist’s grave in Paris to celebrate. In 2017, Japanese online retailer Yusaku Maezawa, who began his career selling CDs from his home, bought a Basquiat graffiti-like skull painting for $110mn."}],[{"start":292.09999999999997,"text":"Crucially, such paintings don’t need expert explanation or validation. Do Rothko’s coloured hazes express “basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom”, as he claimed? Is Warhol as superficial (“just look at the surface of my paintings . . . there’s nothing behind it”) as he insisted? It’s anyone’s guess. What’s aught but as ’tis valued? These pictures balance obvious, easy splendour with mystique about possible deeper meaning, plus the charisma and bafflement of mega-prices — that a few strokes of pigment on canvas can cost as much as a whole London street. Simultaneously democratic and exclusive, such expensive paintings are also rebellious, path-breaking: self-flattering choices for wealthy collectors who are often pioneering businessmen. "}],[{"start":338.04999999999995,"text":"A frisson of transgression — but not too much — lifts prices. De Kooning’s huge-breasted, fiercely grinning “Woman III” is scary but comic. Modigliani’s confrontational nudes display pubic hair but recline with Renaissance grace. Matisse’s nudes (too serene/safe) and Egon Schiele’s (too explicit) fetch lower prices. Hitting the sweet spot are Klimt’s “Water Serpents II” ($183mn), hinting at a lesbian orgy, and “The Dream” ($155mn), where a penis forms half the face of Picasso’s lover Marie-Thérèse Walter."}],[{"start":374.84999999999997,"text":"These tastes cross cultures. Picasso’s seductive harem nudes “Les Femmes d’Alger” sold for $179mn, his record, to Qatar’s Al Thani family in 2015. Orientalism, controversial in the west, attracts eastern collectors. Chinese buyers bought Klimt’s portraits decorated with oriental motifs: “Lady with a Fan” ($108mn) and “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II” ($150mn) in 2023 and 2016 respectively."}],[{"start":408.7,"text":"Interactions between geography, history and social forces fascinatingly determine shifts in what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital”. In The Economics of Taste, Gerald Reitlinger remembers Rubens selling poorly in the 1900s “because the puritanical taste of American millionaires was against masses of flesh”. Japan’s suddenly wealthy 1980s collectors sought Van Gogh, who was influenced by Japanese art. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":436.95,"text":"Today, while western museums diversify, shifting from Euramerican male-dominated narratives, Middle Eastern and south-east Asian collectors amass trophies of western modernism — emblematic now of capitalism’s global triumph. "}],[{"start":452.59999999999997,"text":"In 2006, The New Yorker wondered if Lauder with his “second-tier” Klimt could be “rewriting art history with a cheque book”? No one imagined then how contested art history would become as the 21st century reconsidered the 20th through artists once marginalised by geography, gender or race."}],[{"start":471.79999999999995,"text":"The market sometimes contributes, giving prominence, as with Klimt, to lesser-known artists. Joan Mitchell did not sell for more than £1mn until 2004; in 2023 her record reached $29mn; Tate’s 2025 display followed. The auction record for a painting by a female artist is $54mn, paid in November for Frida Kahlo’s “The Dream (The Room)”; historically lagging far behind prices for male artists, prices for paintings by women have accelerated in the last decade, and may be a future focus of collector interest. “The deeper you go into the history of art by women, the more you realise how much of it still needs to be told,” says Christian Levett, the collector who founded FAMM, a museum in Mougins dedicated solely to art by women, in 2024."}],[{"start":520.5999999999999,"text":"But in general collectors resist any criterion except a painting’s quality and visual appeal, a weighty riposte to western museums’ current sociological framing of art. In 2023, the 50th anniversary year of Picasso’s death, the place to see his work in New York was not It’s Pablo-matic, the Brooklyn Museum’s pathetic exhibition about his misogyny, but Sotheby’s sale preview of his great “Femme à la montre” ($139mn). "}],[{"start":548.55,"text":"As, in the main, the market diverges from museums’ increasingly political/conceptual agendas, auction exhibitions — free, superbly installed — are refreshing and welcome. London’s loveliest spring show was Sotheby’s Joe Lewis collection featuring, along with Klimt ($48mn) and Modigliani ($64mn), modernist masterpieces by Chagall and Magritte — beloved painters who have not had London museum shows in, respectively, 40 and 50 years. "}],[{"start":579.65,"text":"So a new private/public sector equilibrium is emerging as uber-wealthy collectors create their own canon: an elite in terms of price but when sold at auction — Christie’s “Number 7A” this year, Sotheby’s “Elisabeth Lederer” last autumn — allowing us all to enjoy some of the world’s most beautiful paintings. "}],[{"start":599.15,"text":"Many will eventually end up in museums, though few in Europe. Liu Yiqian’s Modigliani shimmers at his Long Museum, Shanghai. “Collecting means gathering and hiding the works of art, so it’s a possessive act,” he says, but “a museum can satisfy my need to possess and to share my collection.” "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":618.15,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":634.4999999999999,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1787380523_5553.mp3"}