The
Most Expensive and Wanted Artworks in the World
If a piece is
“truly, truly to die for” and is still in private hands, it is no doubt on
someone else’s wish list. Like that $100 million Cézanne
By Kelly Tomas
The Museum of Modern Art has one. So does Los Angeles collector Eli Broad. They can be predictable or idiosyncratic, practical or fantastical. But most wish lists are very, very private. “That’s really personal stuff,” a top New York collector chuckled when asked to name his most wanted artworks still in private hands. Yearning—the more discreet the better—makes the art world go ’round. Dealers and auction specialists at the top of their game know where the most wanted artworks are at any given moment and what price might wrest a coveted object from its owner. Museum curators keep track of the same information to court loans and gifts. Collectors, meanwhile, no matter how desired the works in their own collections, always have an eye on something else.“ We all have our wish lists but we don’t go around talking about them. It gets in the way of our getting the work,” says Miami art collector Donald Rubell. “We hope that when our friends die, their children won’t like their art. Those are our silent wishes.”
Jackson Pollock’s
Lucifer, a prime 1947 drip painting owned by the Anderson Collection in
San Francisco, is so coveted it could fetch $50 million or more, sources say,
were it ever to come on the market. (Don’t hold your breath: entertainment
mogul David Geffen, who owns Pollock’s coveted Number 5, 1948, offered
the Andersons $50 million for Lucifer in the mid-1990s, according to
sources, and was rejected.)Shipping magnate George Embiricos owns Cézanne’s
The Cardplayers (1892–93), the only work in the series in private hands,
which experts say could be worth as much as $100 million. Canadian publisher
Kenneth Thomson and his son, David, recently paid $76 million for Rubens’s
recently discovered The Massacre of the Innocents (ca. 1609–11) at
Sotheby’s, against competition from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Yet Rembrandt’s 1654 portrait Jan Six (owned by the Six family
foundation in Amsterdam), says New York dealer Otto Naumann, is possibly the
most wanted Old Master painting in private hands. “It is a killer,” says
Naumann. “It is worth in excess of $150 million easily.” The whereabouts of
the most expensive painting ever sold at auction—van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr.
Gachet (1890), which sold for $82.5 million at Christie’s in 1990 and $90
million seven years later in a private sale through Sotheby’s—remain a mystery
but to a select few. (They’re not talking.) But hotel-casino mogul Steve Wynn,
for one, would rather acquire van Gogh’s Portrait of Patience Escalier
(1888) or the artist’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe (1889),
both of which are owned by the Niarchos family, heirs of the late Greek
shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos. “Those are the two pictures I’d want before
Dr. Gachet,” Wynn told ARTnews. “Dr. Gachet is known
primarily because of the amount of money that was spent on it.”