$14.2 billion!!
That’s the total income for fine art Christie’s and Sotheby’s generated through auctions and private sales. The figure shows a drop of 13% from 2022 at $16.4 billion. But that doesn’t mean you, as a collector, won’t have the opportunity to purchase a great masterpiece if you have a disposable $40 million or more to spend.
Top Ten Most Expensive Paintings Sold at Auction in 2023:
Read this while seated—you may faint—see the unbelievable money spent!
- Picasso’s Femme à la Montre (1932) brought $139.4 million at Sotheby’s. This is Picasso’s cubistic homage to his 23-year-old lover Marie-Therese Walter. He met her in 1927 when she was seventeen, him forty-five and married.
- Gustav Klimt, Lady with a Fan (1917–8) sold at Sotheby’s London for $108.4 million, the highest price paid for a single work of art in Europe. The painting sold previously in 1994 for $11.6 million, grossing the owner $96.8 million in twenty-nine years.
- Claude Monet, Le basin aux Nympheas (1917–9) sold for $74 million. Christie’s legendary auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen “calling” his last auction sold this huge lily pad painting.
- Jean-Michel Basquiat, El Gran Spectaculo (1983), painted by the twenty-two-year-old Basquiat, sold for $67 million at Christie’s NY.
- Gustav Klimt, Insel im Attersee (1901-2), a seascape painted for Klimt’s own enjoyment, sold for $53.2 million at Sotheby’s. The artist known for his portrait commissions painted this atmospheric nature scene on vacation.
- Francis Bacon, Figure in Movement (1976), sold for $52 million at Christie’s. Bacon’s tortured, locking shapes “speak” to the tragic death of his lover and muse, George Dyer.
- Mark Rothko, Yellow Orange Yellow (1955), a seven-foot-tall canvas formerly owned by the artist, sold by Steve Wynn of Las Vegas for $46.4 million at Christie’s NY.
Richard Diebenkorn, Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad (1965), documenting Diebenkorn’s visit to the Soviet Union’s great museums to view Matisse’s works, sold for $46.4 million at Christie’s.- Wassily Kandinsky, Munau with Church (1910) sold for $47.2 million. A museum acquired this landscape in 1951 from dealers known for selling Nazi looted art. After the work returned to heirs of the rightful owners, one of whom died in 1935, it sold at Sotheby’s, London.
- Henri Rousseau, Les Flaments (1907) sold for $43.5 million at Christie’s. This set a record for this notoriously self-taught artist known for surreal, flat, primitive paintings.
Trending COLLECTIBLE objects that ‘became’ valuable in 2023:
Information provided by RR Auctions, seller of rare documents, manuscripts, autographs, and historic artifacts.
- Autographs on documents of historical importance are hot. For example, a signed Einstein draft paper titled “The Formal Basis of the General Theory of Relativity” hits the auction-block February 2024….
- Due to interest in the upcoming 2024 Paris Olympics, anything Olympic-related is popular. The silver medal of swimmer Steve Genter, who in spite of a ruptured lung came in second to golden boy Mark Spitz in the games of 1972 in Munich, comes up for auction in 2024.
- Anything Apple or Jobs is valuable: RR Auctions sold a simple bank check, signed ‘Steve(n) Jobs,’ made out to the now defunct Radio Shack for $4.01 in 1976—for $46,063.
- Space memorabilia will rocket to new heights if past results are an indication. RR sold pilot Scott Carpenter’s Project Mercury’s Aurora 7 (1962) spacecraft’s console clock for $243,600. Other space-related objects sold include a NASA gold Omega Speedmaster™ wristwatch which belonged to Ronald Evans, command module pilot on Apollo 17 (1972). Also auctioned, Alan Bean’s NASA Speedmaster™ watch, and Gus Grissom’s watch. Bean walked on the moon in 1969. Grissom, commander of Apollo 1, died in 1967 during a prelaunch test at Cape Kennedy. NASA inscribed commemorative watches: “To mark man’s conquest of space with time, through time, on time.” This group sold collectively for $974,238! More SPACE? RR auctioned Gene Cernan’s 1972 moonwalk glove and the attached paper Apollo 17 EVA1 checklist for $375k, and Lunar Module pilot Charlie Duke’s space shovel (called a moon rock scooper) from Apollo 16 used on the moon in 1972 sold for $825k.
The image of Mickey Mouse also now trends in memes, and not all of them pleasant. Disney’s mouse and other works copyrighted in 1928 entered the public domain on January 1, 2024. The once Disney-owned mouse can now say and do any number of horrible snarky things not allowed before. Social media became awash with versions of a killer Steamboat Willie and such rodent aberrations. Public domain is not meant to encourage this kind of artistic license. Ideally a character or image in the public domain becomes the starting point for further creative expression, providing authors and artists with the inspiration and raw material to create something new. Watch out Mickey and Minnie! You will see yourselves put in some compromising positions….