The Record-Breaking Auction Results for Monet, Basquiat, and More Art World Icons
Including a Warhol Marilyn and Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud, plus Klimt, Rothko, and Picasso, these ten works reflect the range of artists represented at the highest levels of the market
Record-setting auction results rarely come as a surprise to collectors and market watchers. Here, prices are less arbitrary than they may first appear, instead reflecting a broader consensus about works considered most influential. It’s no surprise, then, that the same names tend to reappear in fine art auctions. Their most recognizable works remain in active conversation with artists working today, and these sales serve as benchmarks not only for individual careers but also for art history itself. From rediscovered works by Old Masters like Leonardo Da Vinci, to postwar figures such as Andy Warhol, these paintings continue to inspire viewers centuries and decades after their creation. Here is a list of the top auction results (not the most expensive artworks overall, where the same names hold multiple slots) by 10 artists who dominate the records for the most expensive paintings ever sold.
1. Salvator Mundi, Leonardo Da Vinci
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (c. 1500) achieved an unprecedented $450.3 million at Christie’s in 2015. Over a decade later, it is still the most expensive painting ever sold. Often cited as one of the most important and most controversial paintings in the canon, it depicts Christ as “The Savior of the World.” He is shown raising his right hand in blessing while holding an orb in his left. The painting’s blurry imagery has made some critics question the extent of Da Vinci’s authorship. The piece was rediscovered in 2005, heavily overpainted. The work underwent years of conservation and research before being returned to the market.
2. Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer, Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer (1914-1916) is a full-length portrait standing over six feet tall of the daughter of one of Klimt’s most prolific patrons. A founding member of the Vienna Secession movement, Klimt draws on East Asian motifs in the ornamental background of this oil painting, where stylized images of soldiers, royal attendants, and blue dragons, reminiscent of symbols found in Qing Dynasty art, envelope a fashionably dressed cosmopolitan sitter. The painting is a key example of the influence of Japanese and Chinese aesthetics on the West during this time. A caveat: while Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer is the second most expensive painting ever auctioned, it is not the second most expensive painting: Willem de Kooning’s Interchange was privately sold for a reported $300 million.
3. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) was sourced from a 1953 publicity photograph of Marilyn Monroe taken for the film Niagara. Monroe’s image was reproduced to the point of saturation, but Warhol, preoccupied by fame and consumerism, reworked it into a screenshot with flat planes of color and sharp outlines. Using his signature technique, Monroe appears with neon-yellow hair, blue eyeshadow, and red lipstick set against a sage-blue background, her features simplified and detached from any sense of interiority. The result is less a portrait than something approaching a logo.
The work belongs to Warhol’s Shot Marilyn series, a group of canvases famously punctured in 1964 by performance artist Dorothy Podber, who fired a gun through the stacked paintings at The Factory. Warhol repaired it, and later folded this incident into the work’s mythology. More recently, the painting was sold at Christie’s in 2022 for $195 million, one of the most closely watched sales of that year.
4. Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’), Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) is the culminating work in a series of 15 paintings inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Picasso reconfigures the Algerian concubines through the fractured lens of Cubism into a dense arrangement of angular forms and compressed images. Where Delacroix’s women recline in a spacious interior, Picasso’s version is abstracted and unsettled. The figures remain legible but destabilized, their identities filtered through Picasso’s modernism rather than Delacroix’s Orientalist frame. The painting sold at Christie’s for $179.4 million, a record for the artist.
5. Nu couché, Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Modigliani is best known for his elongated portraits and nudes, in a style that sits firmly between modernism and classicism. His Nu couché (1917), one of a series of reclining nudes commissioned by the dealer Zbrowski, is among his most widely reproduced works. The painting depicts a woman stretched across a red sofa, her gaze meeting the viewer directly. When first exhibited in Paris in 1917, the series caused a scandal for its frank display of nudity. The work sold at Christie’s in 2015 for $170.4 million.
6. Three Studies of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon
Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) is an oil on canvas triptych depicting the painter Lucian Freud, once a close friend and artistic rival, against a flat yellow background and a shallow olive green interior. The distorted life-size figure is reproduced across three panels, Freud’s likeness stretched and disturbed, resisting stable form. The panels themselves were separated for decades before being reunified in 1999. Its appeal lies in the rarity of the work, a major subject, and its place in Bacon’s most important period of portraiture. The painting sold at Christie’s in 2013 for $142.4 million, setting a record for the artist.
7. Meules, Claude Monet
Claude Monet’s Meules (1890) belongs to his Haystacks series, which returns to the same bales in Giverny, Normandy (Monet’s place of residence) under shifting conditions of light and atmosphere. A founder of Impressionism, Monet turned this single subject into a sustained meditation across 25 paintings between 1890 and 1891. What changes is not the haystack itself but how it is seen and interpreted at different times of day. This work from the series sold at Sotheby’s in 2019 for $110.7 million, then a record for Impressionist art. Here, Monet captures the haystack at sunset, its form saturated in vibrant oranges and blues, as light nearly overtakes it.
8. Untitled, Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s iconic lexicon of skeletons, crowns, and scribbled phrases could only have been forged in 1980s downtown New York, where graffiti, music, and art collided in real time. His Untitled, (1982) sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2017, a sale that marked a turning point in the market for postwar American painting. Created during a pivotal year in his career, the canvas centers on a skull rendered in jagged lines and electrifying color, its features fragmented and dynamic. Executed in acrylic, oilslick, and spray paint, the work reflects Basquiat’s ongoing engagement with race, identity, and mortality.
9. No. 10, Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko’s No. 10 (1958) is an oil-on-canvas painting composed of expansive fields of ochre set against a darker edge that seems to press in on the viewer. By this point, Rothko had moved away from traditional composition, reducing the canvas to hovering blocks of color that lack clear boundaries. The forms appear to dissolve, creating a sense of depth that feels alive. The painting relies on scale and color to evoke the viewer’s experience. This work sold at Christie’s in 2015 for $80.9 million. Its appeal lies in its position within Rothko’s evolving practice.
Note that No. 10 is the most expensive Rothko sold at auction, but not the most expensive Rothko ever sold. That honor falls to No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red), painted by Rothko in 1951, which changed hands for a $186 million in a private sale in 2014, making it the 3rd most expensive painting ever sold at the time.
10. Composition No. II, Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian’s Composition No. II (1929) is a defining work by one of modernism’s most influential figures. His visual language, primary colors contained within a grid of thick black lines, remains instantly recognizable nearly a century later. In this composition, the prominent red plane anchors the surface, a feature that appears less frequently in works from this period. The painting feels at once historical and contemporary, contributing to its enduring appeal. It sold at Sotheby’s for $51 million, undoubtedly because of its balance and place in art history.