Provenance Research

Highest Art Market Sales

Record-breaking sales dominate headlines, yet they represent only a thin layer of the art market. Inflation-adjusted prices from 1987 to 2026 show how that top tier has changed, and how strongly it favors modern and postwar painting.

**Art Market Sales from 1987 to 2026**© Sandra M. Samolik. Protected content, downloading, copying, or redistribution without permission is prohibited. Click or tap the figure to enlarge.

Headlines about the art market are dominated by a small number of record-breaking sales. The scatter plot above shows the highest known prices paid for paintings from 1987 to 2026, using inflation-adjusted values in millions of US dollars (2025). Each point is a sale; color indicates the year the work was created.

Several patterns stand out. Most of the highest prices belong to works made after about 1875, especially Impressionist, modern, and postwar paintings, which appear here in warm colors. A much smaller number of older works appear in cooler colors. Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi remains the most expensive sale on record. Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, Holbein, Botticelli, and a handful of Chinese paintings appear more rarely at this price level.

The dashed line marks $100 million in adjusted dollars. Sales above that threshold become more frequent after about 2006, with a particularly dense cluster between 2012 and 2018. More recent records include Klimt's Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (2025) and Pollock's Number 7A (2026).

These figures represent only the visible top of the market. Many private sales are never disclosed, and the vast majority of transactions take place at far lower prices, as discussed in The Entry-Level (Low-End) Art Market.