The World's Most Expensive Painting is Worth US$179 M - Whose Masterpiece?

It's now part of the history. This painting is worth US$179 million and was sold to an anonymous buyer and broke the previous record set by Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud which is worth $142.4 million in 2013.

most expensive painting in the world

The auction happened in Christie's, an art business and a fine arts auction house, currently the world's largest, with sales for the first half of 2012 some $3.5 billion, representing the highest total for a corresponding period in company and art market history.

Whose Painting is the Most Expensive Painting Ever Sold?


It is the painting of Pablo Picasso in 1955 known as the "Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O)" or "Women of Algiers". Sold at a whopping value of US$179, 365,000 (£115m) (the price includes commission).

According to a Guardian article, Pablo Picasso’s 1955 painting Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) is such a remarkable and important masterpiece that it could maintain the world record auction price for at least a decade.

Pablo Picasso's Les Femmes d Alger (Women of Algiers) background info


Olivier Camu, Christie’s Deputy Chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art had these insights on the paintings history:

Pablo Picasso's Les femmes d’Alger (Women of Algiers)

“Les femmes d’Alger, (Version “O”) is the culmination of a herculean project which Picasso started after Matisse’s death, in homage to his lost friend and competitor, and which over a period of two months and after nearly 100 studies on paper and 14 other paintings led to the creation of this canvas in February 1955. Picasso painted a series of 15 variations on Delacroix’s Les femmes d’Alger, designated as versions A through O. Throughout his series, Picasso references the Spanish master’s two versions of the shared subject, intermingling their elements.”

“To me there is no past or future in my art,” Picasso wrote in 1923. “If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was…”

If you are a billionaire, would you invest for a million-dollar painting such that of Picasso's Les femmes d’Alger?

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