Only five of the prices on this list were called out in an auction room. The other seven sales were private, and their real figures surfaced later, in a newspaper, a courtroom or a national budget. Each painting brought more than 175 million dollars. One of them had sold in 2005 for less than the price of a used car.
Leonardo da Vinci (attributed), Salvator Mundi, about 1500, sold in 2017 for 450.3 million dollars
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A painting reaches these prices by one of two roads. At auction, the hammer price is called out in the room, the buyer adds the house's fee, and the total is public the same evening.
A private sale is arranged by a dealer or an auction house, and nothing is announced. The figure comes out later, if ever, in a newspaper, a lawsuit or a government budget. Read in order, the twelve sales keep bringing back the same few buyers and dealers.
The ranking uses one number: what the buyer actually paid, fees included, with euros converted at the rate of the day the sale was announced. When two canvases changed hands in one deal, each counts only with its own reported price.
12. Pablo Picasso, Women of Algiers (Version O), 1955: 179.4 million dollars
Pablo Picasso, Women of Algiers (Version O), 1955, private collection. Low resolution image, used for commentary.
At the center of Version O of Women of Algiers, a reclining woman is broken into hard planes of red and blue. Pablo Picasso finished the canvas in Paris on February 14, 1955, and in May 2015 it sold at Christie's New York for 179,365,000 dollars, fees included.
The canvas closes a series. Five weeks after the death of Henri Matisse, his longtime rival, Picasso began reworking a picture Delacroix had painted in 1834 of Algerian women at home. He painted fifteen versions, and Version O is the last of them.
From there its price climbed in three steps. In June 1956 the New York collectors Victor and Sally Ganz bought all fifteen canvases from Picasso's Paris dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, for 80 million francs, about 212,500 dollars at the time. They later resold ten and kept five, Version O among them.
When the Ganz heirs sold their collection at Christie's New York in November 1997, Version O was estimated at 10 to 12 million dollars and went for 31.9 million. Eighteen years later Christie's offered it again with an estimate of about 140 million. Bidding opened just below 100 million, and after about eleven minutes the hammer fell at 160 million.
The buyer stayed anonymous. Press reports later named Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, a former prime minister of Qatar, a claim the buyer has never confirmed. With fees, the price made Version O the most expensive artwork sold at auction up to that day.
At a Glance
Artist: Pablo Picasso (1881 to 1973)
Painted: 1955
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 114 × 146.4 cm (44.9 × 57.6 in)
Where to see it: Private collection, location not public
11. Jackson Pollock, Number 7A, 1948: 181.2 million dollars
Jackson Pollock, Number 7A, 1948, private collection. Low resolution image, used for commentary.
Black lines loop and tangle across Number 7A, a strip of raw, unprimed canvas almost 11 feet wide, with pools of paint, thin skeins and a few flashes of red that are easy to miss on a canvas this long. Jackson Pollock made it in 1948, in his barn studio on Long Island. When Christie's offered it in May 2026, the painting had not been shown in public for almost fifty years, and the auction house would not even print an estimate.