The Most Expensive Artists in the World: Icons of Art Market Success
American art is a category of broadly defined culture, includes letters, textile work and other arts produced in the Americas that represent style or identity. As such, it spans a range of years, media, genres, and styles far too great to effectively preserve here — representing the rich tapestry of cultural history in America. Various movements such as the Hudson River School, American Realism, the Harlem Renaissance, and Abstract Expressionism demonstrate the changing nature of American art. While these works might be under the purview of Modern Art departments at the big auction houses, together they elevate American art and account for a large swath of the success in America to comment on social, political and cultural changes.
Coming to the list of most expensive American artists that exist:
1. Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons, the King of Kitsch is one of a handful of artists whose works uniquely combine high art with popular culture. His priciest work, “Rabbit,” was sold for $91.075 million at Christie’s in New York. Koons was a stockbroker on Wall Street before enrolling in art school. He recycles everyday objects, drawing on Duchampian and Warholian modes of common object modulating, with worksheets considering childlike toys and pop art agency. Read More “It is a very polarizing work of his, but he often outsources the producing to as team, while noting that communication should never be considered lost for an artist, and specifically not in art making.
2. Jean-Michel Basquiat
A pioneering American artist who in his raw, highly responsive work combined graffiti and text with abstraction. Basquiat emerged in the 1980s, talking about race and identity and social commentary. Painted in 2007, he achieved his all-time auction high price on November 14, 2018 when his diptych “Untitled (Pollo Frito)” sold for $25,701,500 at Sotheby’s New York. The powerful influence of Basquiat’s specific style, unique innovation on the contemporary canvas and his introspective subject matter have left an indelible mark not just in art history but as one of most widely-recognized and celebrated artist figures today.
3. Christopher Wool
The Chicago-born American artist Christopher Wool emerged based on the scale of his large canvases and the work painted with black characters. If Wool’s work emerged in the 80s and began to be recognized, she mentions his interest in deep (surface ), gesture (notation) obliterated- creation/destruction. In his paintings, he often layers paint only to scrape or pile it away, producing the tension between seen and unseen. Wool-esque patterns of repetition and diversion are at once simple and conceptual, reflecting the legacy of Pop Art and Conceptual Art. In 2018, The 1990 “Untitled” by the artist sold for $15.2 million at Christie’s New York and set the auctioneer record for Basquiat. Wool took his techniques farther with screen printing and hand painting in the 2000s.
4. Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper American realist painter whose spare and finely calculated renderings of the loneliness and anonymity of modern life became icons of mid-20th-century America. He distinguished himself from his contemporaries by capturing scenes of the quotidian American experience with an unvarnished verisimilitude. His paintings often show individuals alone in desolate spaces, capturing moments of description meant for contemplation. Hopper’s most expensive art object, Chop Suey, set at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $91.9 million This painting, like so many of his others, highlights his masterful light-dark intersections in order to communicate dynamic emotional narratives rooted firmly in the lexicon of American art-culture.
5. Georgia O’Keeffe
An American modernist painter, Georgia O’Keeffe is famous for her large and close-up paintings of flowers as well as landscapes of peaceful countryside. She was known for her use of color and unique shape composition that blends reality with fantasy to invoke strong emotions and even a sense of touch in her paintings. At Sotheby’s in 2014, “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” the most expensive work of art ever painted by O’Keeffe, was sold for $44.4 million breaking the previous record for highest price achieved for a piece by a female artist@EntityComputed Her flair, originality and subject matter has gone on to establish her as one of the key artists of the 20th century.
6. Kaws a.k.a. Brian Donnelly
Brian Donnelly, widely recognized as Kaws (born 1974 in Jersey City to parents of Irish and American origin), is an American artist and designer. Inspired from Pop Art and Disney, The Simpsons he makes exceptional street art, paintings, sculptures and design. Svs of course is a grad from the School of Visual Arts; you can spot his work in major museums like Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth and the High Museum in Atlanta. New readers eying the highest reaches of KAWS auction prices for the first time might recall that his auction record was set in April 2019 when “The Kaws Album” sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for $14,772,700. Kaws also collaborates with music and film celebrities, as well as Nike. The artist merges the realm of fine art and commercial art due to this interaction.
7. Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko is one of the most anticipated American post-war figures in art, famous for his large abstract canvases dominated by bright colore areas that evoke strong spiritual or emotional reactions. A career from the 1930s consisting of wildly expressionist paintings executed in bold primary colours, during the next decade it morphed to accommodate surrealist influences and increasingly abstract forms — visual symbols inspired by animals, figures both mythical and human. Known for incorporating spirituality into the realm of abstraction, Rothko created work with a profound emotional depth. The artwork sold for $50,095,250 at Sotheby’s New York on May 16, 2019 and is one of the record prices to be paid for his original work even post his death proving to the industry that he lives on in their hearts through timeless pieces.
8. Andy Warhol
Pop Art legend Andy Warhol is the proof that after many years in the grave, his work still fetches high amounts. Born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Warhol changed art history between the Sixties through the Eighties with his signature images, like Campbell’s soup cans and common goods among others. His piece, “Double Elvis [Ferus Type],” was indicative of Warhol’s obsession with celebrity culture and realized a sale price of $53,000,000 at Christie’s New York on 30 November 2019. This work, also on view during 1963 at the Ferus Gallery was just as Elvis Presley symbolized classic Hollywood fodder for Warhol. Through the 1950s, Warhol worked as an illustrator for Glamour and Vogue, among other major magazines.Although he was starting to break with tradition in the art world, his greatest innovations were yet to come.
9. Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg: Robert Rauschenberg (born October 22, 1925 Port Arthur, Texas) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. His work is both prolific and diverse, extending to painting, engraving, photography, choreography, music. It was estimated at $50m and sold on May 15, 2019 for $88,805,000 at Christie’s New York, a vast silkscreen in art-political drag with multitudes of embedded symbols. It was Rauschenberg’s photographs, however, that also helped define this iconic work, with the newspaper and magazine images blending to mirror a complete vision of American culture.
10. Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein is a popular Pop artist who creates remarkable comic book-style paintings using vivid palette, Ben-Day dots and geometric lines. Born in New York on Oct. 27, 1923, Lichtenstein was among a circle of pop artists who turned everyday images from comic strips and commercial art into high art. Christie’s New York sold his most valuable work of art, “Nude with Joyous Painting,” for $46.2 million in 2008. This aesthetic fusion of high and pop culture art epitomizes his creative approach.
11. Willem de Kooning
On November 13, 2018, a work of art by Willem de Kooning (Dutch American who became one of America’s most famous abstract expressionists) sold at Christie’s New York fetched $68,937,500. Illegally migrating here in 1926, de Kooning enrolled at Rotterdam School of Fine Arts and Sciences before redefining the portrayal of the female body in art. His revolutionary collection is a lesson in how women and beauty can be reimagined, inspired by Pablo Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon. De Kooning’s first solo exhibition was in 1950, to great acclaim but with controversial variations over his status as the driving artist of abstract expressionism.
References
- https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/10-most-expensive-american-artists/
- https://www.thecollector.com/american-art-auction-results/
- https://www.forbesindia.com/article/explainers/most-expensive-paintings-world/91793/1
- https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-expensive-artworks-sold-2022.
