Qatar’s royal family has paid a whopping $250 million for Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players, making the artwork the new record-holder for world’s most expensive painting.
The record-breaking sale beats the previous record of $140 million paid for Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948 in 2006.
The painting is one of five in a series of post-impressionist works by Cézanne, painted in the early-to-mid 1890s. The other four pieces are held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Courtauld Institute in London and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
Victor Wiener, a leading fine art appraiser, said: “You take any art history course and a Card Players is likely to be in it. It’s a major, major image.
“Now everyone will use this price as a point of departure. It changes the whole art-market structure.”
The work was bought late last year from the estate of George Embiricos, a Greek shipping magnate. The record-breaking sale price was disclosed earlier this week in Vanity Fair magazine.
Nicolai Iljine, an art consultant for the Guggenheim art museum in Manhattan, New York, said: “There is not much great art left on the market and there is a lot of competition to get it.”
Cézanne chose two stony-faced figures from his family’s estate outside Aix-en-Provence in France for the piece: gardener Paulin Paulet and farm hand Père Alexandre.
“Today everything is changing, but not for me,” he said of the work. “I live in my hometown, and I rediscover the past in the faces of people my age.”
Qatar was ranked the world’s biggest contemporary art buyer last year by The Art Newspaper, with Sheikha Al Mayassa, the Emir’s 28-year-old daughter, a driving force behind the attempt to turn the oil-rich desert state into a cultural centre to rival Paris and New York.
Among other recent additions to Qatar’s art collection are Mark Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) and Damien Hirst’s Lullaby Spring. The Qatar National Museum is likely to be the new home for The Card Players.
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