Auctions have been the preferred route for the sale of valuable paintings, but the world’s most expensive don’t feature on the list. That’s because they are generally owned or held at museums. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is on permanent display at The Louvre museum in Paris and was assessed at $100 million in 1962; taking inflation into account, the value would be around $780 million today.
Nevertheless, the Top 10 paintings auctioned command a staggering value of $1.6 billion. Apart from Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol who account for nearly half the paintings in the list of the Top 50, one of the exceptional cases was graffiti artist David Choe, who accepted payment in shares in Facebook, which was worth $200 million at the time of the IPO.