Private sale, September Seller: David Geffen. Buyer: Kenneth C. The most expensive contemporary painting ever. Private sale, Seller: George Embiricos. Buyer: Royal Family of Qatar. The fabulous psychological intensity in the faces of the players make this painting a masterpiece of post-impressionist art.
Private sale, early Seller: Rudolf Staechelin Family Trust. Buyer: Qatar Museums?. Seller: Yves Bouvier. Buyer: Dmitri Rybolovlev. Seller: Private collection, Saudi Arabia. Buyer: Anonymous. Seller: Private collection. Buyer: Liu Yiqian. Warhol's portraits of Marilyn Monroe rank among the most iconic artworks ever created. The "Orange" version is arguably the most striking and desirable of all of them.
Seller: Francesco De Simone Niquesa? Rembrandt created these depictions of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit a year after the couple was married. French acquisition laws required that the paintings be owned separately, but the countries agreed that the works would always be exhibited together, at either the Louvre or the Rijksmuseum. Three Studies of Lucian Freud is one of several works Francis Bacon created depicting his friend and artistic rival Lucian Freud , who often returned the favor.
Depicting colorful landscapes, such as mountains and trees, alongside masterful calligraphy, this set of 12 ink-brush panels showcases the whimsical style that typifies the work of Qi Baishi, a Chinese artist well-known for his playful brushwork. The painting depicts a young Parisian street girl, naked and holding a basket of flowers.
The artist depicted stacks of harvested wheat in a field at different times of the day and year, using variety of expressive colors to capture the changing light and atmosphere. Meules is especially vibrant, showing the sun setting behind haystacks bathed in light.
Composed of black brushstrokes and harshly vibrant yellows, reds and blues, this work is one of many skull paintings that American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat created over his lifetime, most of them highly valued today. The painting belonged to Los Angeles art collectors Sidney and Frances Brody for almost 60 years, during which time it was exhibited only once. Picasso created this oil the same year as Young Girl with a Flower Basket , when he was just 24 years old and living in Paris.
Belonging to his Rose Period, it depicts a young boy wearing a wreath of flowers and holding a pipe. In this Cubist work, Picasso portrays his lover French photographer, painter and poet Dora Maar sitting in a chair with a cat balanced on one of her shoulders.
This Renaissance portrait depicts an unidentified nobleman holding a roundel that contains a small painting of a saint attributed to Italian painter Bartolomeo Bulgarini. Only around 50 Botticelli paintings still exist, making them very highly valued. The series is full of conspiracy theories about the never-solved robbery.
And Lewis has a new eight-episode podcast, Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of the Art World , which promises stories of "the ugliest crimes, the biggest scandals and the murky in-between. The Met has since returned the coffin to Egypt. That these tales can work in a podcast, where no one can even see the work being described, suggests how much the allure of today's art-crime stories is in the skulduggery and mystery, not aesthetics.
Many factors seem to have converged to create this flourishing moment for true art crime. There is so much information in the public sphere that everyone can have the illusion of being an insider. There are more and more platforms for telling stories. And Lewis points out that as the art market has enlarged, our world view itself has changed.
The general attitude toward art crime, he says, used to be shrugged off as "it's billionaires spending money, crooking each other", but today there is a realisation that "no, you can't loot that country's entire cultural heritage".
Amidst all these delightfully tangled histories, nothing rivals the Salvator Mundi. Unless new documentation surfaces unlikely after all these centuries , or a new scientific method of authentication arrives also tricky because the work has been so damaged , the mystery may prove eternal. Because at the end of the day, it's an entertaining story. All episodes of the Art Bust podcast are available now. Love film and TV? If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
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