1. The Card Players (1892-93), Paul Cezanne – $259 million
This is actually a series of five paintings done by the post-impressionist artist from France named Paul Cezanne. The first two featured three card players. One has a single spectator aside from the three players and is housed with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The other has two spectators and is owned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The last three featured two players only. One is housed with the Musee d’ Orsay in Paris and another at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The largest one was sold to the royal family of Qatar in 2011 for $259 million.
An unknown buyer bought this painting via a private sale through Sotheby’s in 2006. Originally owned by Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., the painting is an example of the abstract expressionist movement. It features what appears to be a nest made by liberal amounts of yellow and brown paint drizzled over the canvas.
3.Woman III (1953), Willem de Kooning – $137.5 million
Steven Cohen bought this painting in 2006. The abstract expressionist painting used to be a featured piece at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The Islamic Revolution of 1979, however, led to the banning of the artwork that featured a rough model of a woman. It was then traded in 1994 to David Geffen, who then sold the piece to Cohen. It is one of a series of six paintings by the artist that had a woman as the central theme.
4.Le Reve(1932)Pablo Picasso-$155.0
Le Rêve (French, "The Dream") is a 1932 oil painting (130 × 97 cm) by Pablo Picasso, then 50 years old, portraying his 22-year-old mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. It is said to have been painted in one afternoon, on 24 January 1932.On March 26, 2013, the New York Post reported that Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital had bought the painting from Wynn for $155 million. The price is estimated to be the highest ever paid for an artwork by a U.S. collector.
5.Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), Gustav Klimt – $135 million
This Klimt classic was sold to Ronald Lauder of Neue Galerie in 2006. He used as his model Adele Block-Bauer, the wife of the wealthy Austrian industrialist Ferdinand Block-Bauer. Klimt would later use her again as a model in 1912. Painted in oil and gold, the painting features complex ornamentation in the Jugendstil style. The Nazis confiscated it during the Second World War before it was finally awarded to Maria Altmann, the niece of Bloch-Bauer, in 2006.
