A SECRET sale last year has turned the art world upside down, smashing the world record price for a painting.
The work, The Card Players by French post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne, was bought at auction for a world-record $US250 million ($232 million) by the nation of Qatar, Vanity Fair reported.
Qatar’s royal family paid more than $100 million more than the previous record-holder – Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948 which was reportedly sold for $US140 million ($130 million) at a private auction in 2006.
The sale, according to Vanity Fair, occurred in 2011, but was only confirmed to the magazine by multiple sources this week. Qatar’s royal family declined to comment and all other players involved in the sale signed confidentiality agreements.
The painting is one of a series of five that Cezanne painted in the 1890s. The others, which vary in size and depiction, are housed at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania.
The one bought by Qatar is one of three that shows two men at a table playing cards.
“$250 million is a fortune,” Victor Wiener, a fine-art appraiser told Vanity Fair. “But you take any art-history course, and a Card Players is likely in it. It’s a major, major image.”
According to the Gulf Times, the oil-rich nation of Qatar has the third highest density of millionaires in the world after Singapore and Switzerland.
Posted on February 5, 2012 by Editors
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