The 10 most expensive paintings ever sold at auction

Ten paintings, ten evenings, roughly two billion dollars. What follows are the highest prices ever paid for a painting at public auction, with the buyer's premium included where the house reported it. Private sales are left out, because nobody outside the room knows what really happened in them.

Read them for the numbers if you like. The more useful part is what happened in the room: how long the bidding took, where it opened, and who was still in it at the end.

1. Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci — $450.3 million

Christie's New York, November 2017. Bidding ran for about nineteen minutes and closed at a $400 million hammer, with fees taking it to $450.3 million. Christie's put a five-hundred-year-old panel into a contemporary art sale, toured it around the world and let the argument about whether Leonardo painted all of it run in public. The same picture had sold in 2005 for around a thousand dollars, catalogued as the work of a follower.

2. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, Gustav Klimt — $236.4 million

Sotheby's New York, November 2025. Twenty minutes of bidding for a portrait of the daughter of Klimt's most important patrons, sold from the collection of Leonard Lauder. It is the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of modern art. The painting was seized by the Nazis and returned to Elisabeth's brother Erich in 1948.

3. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, Andy Warhol — $195 million

Christie's New York, May 2022. The name comes from an afternoon in 1964 when the performance artist Dorothy Podber fired a pistol into a stack of these canvases in Warhol's studio. Larry Gagosian bid in the room and won it at a $170 million hammer, well under the $200 million estimate. There was no guarantee behind the lot, which is unusual at that level.

4. Number 7A, 1948, Jackson Pollock — $181.2 million

Christie's New York, May 2026, from the collection of S.I. Newhouse. Seven minutes of bidding took it from a $100 million estimate to a $157 million hammer. That is almost three times Pollock's previous auction record. It is the largest of his drip paintings still in private hands, over eleven feet across.

5. Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O), Pablo Picasso — $179.4 million

Christie's New York, May 2015. The last and busiest canvas in a fifteen-part series Picasso painted in answer to Delacroix. The whole fight happened on the telephone, between two Christie's executives bidding for clients neither side could see. It had gone through auction once before, in 1997, for $31.9 million.

6. Nu couché, Amedeo Modigliani — $170.4 million

Christie's New York, November 2015, on a night when several other headline lots failed to sell. It more than doubled the artist's previous record of $70.7 million and went to the Chinese collector Liu Yiqian. When these nudes were first shown in Paris in 1917 the police closed the exhibition after two days.

7. Nu couché (sur le côté gauche), Amedeo Modigliani — $157.2 million

Sotheby's New York, May 2018. Bidding opened at $125 million and ended at a $139 million hammer, which fell short of the $150 million the house had privately hoped for. It still set a record for the most expensive work Sotheby's had ever sold. A high opening bid protects the seller and shortens the fight; both effects showed up here.

8. Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version), Georges Seurat — $149.2 million

Christie's New York, November 2022, from the Paul Allen collection. Bidding opened at $75 million with four parties in it and hammered at $130 million. The result beat Seurat's previous auction record by more than $115 million. The picture shows three models in his studio, standing in front of his own Sunday on La Grande Jatte.

9. Three Studies of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon — $142.4 million

Christie's New York, November 2013, and briefly the most expensive work ever sold at auction. Christie's deliberately placed the triptych ninth in the running order so that the underbidders would still have something to spend their evening on, and the sale went on to total $691.6 million. The three panels had been separated by a dealer in the 1970s and spent about fifteen years apart.

10. Femme à la montre, Pablo Picasso — $139.4 million

Sotheby's New York, November 2023. Marie-Thérèse Walter, painted in 1932, wearing Picasso's own watch. Emily Fisher Landau bought it in 1968, hung it over her mantelpiece and later put it in her own museum in Long Island City; the sale of her collection made $406.4 million in one evening with every lot sold.

What a hall with twenty lots can take from this

None of these prices came from the object sitting there being valuable. They came from two people who both refused to stop. That is the same mechanism as a school gym on a Friday night, and the same three levers control it.

The first is where you open. Salvator Mundi opened at $100 million and closed at four times that. Pollock's Number 7A carried a $100 million estimate and made $181.2 million. Auction houses open low on purpose, because a low opening bid gets more hands moving and a high one ends the contest before it starts. On a charity evening the temptation runs the other way: you know the donated weekend is worth six hundred, so you start it at six hundred and nobody bids. Start it at fifty. The room will find the number. If you are unsure what that looks like in practice, the organiser's guide works through opening bids lot by lot.

The second is time. Nineteen minutes for the Leonardo, twenty for the Klimt, seven for the Pollock. Serious bidding is slow, and a lot that gets thirty seconds gets one bid. When lots run on a clock, give the good ones room to breathe and let the small ones go quickly. How an evening actually runs explains where the countdown sits on the big screen and what happens when a late bid extends it.

The third is that everyone can see the fight. In a saleroom the auctioneer names each increment out loud, so bidders know exactly what it takes to stay in. That visibility is most of the value of a public auction, and it is the thing a paper sheet on a trestle table destroys. Codes at each lot and one screen at the front give a hall the same thing: current lot, current price, seconds left. Groups running art auctions notice the difference first, because their lots are the ones people stand and look at.

The last lesson is about the seventh entry on this list, the Modigliani that hammered below what the seller wanted. Reserves that sit above what the room will pay do not raise money; they turn a lot into a non-event. Set them low, or do not set them at all. You can put your twenty lots in, invent the bidders and rehearse the whole evening for nothing before you decide.

Prices as reported at the time of sale; figures include buyer's premium where stated.