The highest sales of contemporary art in 2022
The highest sold artwork in 2022 is Andy Warhol‘s iconic “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn”, which was sold for more than 195 million US dollars , breaking the artist’s world auction record and becoming the highest sold 20th century artwork in auction history.
Impressionist works become hard currency in the market
Among the TOP 100 with the highest transactions in 2022, Impressionist works occupy 19 seats, which confirms its extensive market appeal. In particular, 10 works by Impressionist master Claude Monet were auctioned, with a total turnover of 439 million US dollars (about 3.05 billion yuan). It also refreshed Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Paul Signac, and Edgar Degas, a total of 6 artists set new personal highest auction records, and Édouard Manet and Pierre August Renoir set the second highest price in personal auctions.
Among them, the work “Models (Small Edition)” by Georges Seurat, a pioneer of Pointillism (Neo-Impressionism), was sold for US$149 million, setting a new record for the artist’s personal highest auction, and the second most expensive artwork sold in 2022. In The Models (Small Edition), Seurat demonstrates the breadth of his color theory and applies it to complex compositions, embedding his famous masterpiece “Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of the Big Bowl” in an entirely new setting.
