When Will You Marry Me - Paul Gauguin

Price in US $ - 300 million

When Will You Marry? (Tahitian: Nafea faa ipoipo) is an oil painting from 1892 by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin. In 1891 Gauguin - the founding father of Primitivism - travelled to Tahiti in search of an edenic paradise where he could create pure, “primitive” art.

Paul Gauguin’s innovations in color treatment would ultimately set the stage for Fauvism and Expressionism.

Flag - Jasper Johns

Price in US $ - 110 million

Flag is an encaustic painting (also known as hot wax painting) by Jasper Johns. Created when Johns was 24 (1954–55), it is arguably the painting for which Johns is best known. His work is often described as Neo-Dadaist and anticipates aspects of pop art, minimal art, and conceptual art.

Critics were unsure whether it was a painted flag or a painting of a flag; Johns later said it was both. Such a painting is surely art - or is it? That is a problem for the viewer, alone. Johns is gone; he has already made the painting, he has already presented the problem. The viewer is left to resolve it as best he can.

Eagle Standing on Pine Tree - Qi Baishi

Price in US $ - 65.5 million

Qi Baishi was an influential Chinese painter who was most noted for the whimsical, often playful style of his watercolour works. "Eagle Standing on Pine Tree; Four-Character Couplet in Seal Script" - this painting of an eagle perched on the branch of a pine tree, surrounded by two calligraphy scrolls, measures 100 by 266 centimetres (three by 8.5 feet). The work was completed by Qi in 1946 and presented to General Chiang Kai-shek for his 60th birthday.

Femme Assise Dans un Jardin - Pablo Picasso

Price in US $ - 49.6 million 

Femme assise dans un jardin (Woman Sitting In A Garden) was painted by Pablo Picasso in a single day in 1938 on a canvas sized 131 X 97 cm. This arresting portrait of Dora Maar seated on a chair in a garden is a dense, complex and exuberantly colored image. It is one of the greatest and grandest depictions the artist made of his fascinating and remarkable mistress in the pre-war period. The painting reflects the challenging relationship which the artist had with his mistress who was a poet, painter, photographer and intellectual.

Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat - Vincent van Gogh

Price in US $ - 47.5 million

Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat is an 1890 painting by Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh went on to paint several versions of this painting. The excellent painting was an oil work on a canvas sized 36 1/4 * 28 3/4 (92 * 73 cm). One such version was used in Stanlist political art of 1930; where a peasant woman is portrayed holding sheaves of wheat. This peasant woman represented a complex and controversial image in the lexicon of Soviet political art. Peasant Woman was also depicted in Nikolai Kochergin's poster. In this poster, Nikolai depicted the woman as a buxom woman wearing a kerchief and bast shoes.

Diana and Callisto - Titian

Price in US $ - 70.6 million

Diana and Callisto is a painting completed between 1556 and 1559 by the Venetian artist Titian. It portrays the moment in which the goddess Diana discovers that her maid Callisto has become pregnant by Jupiter. Titian himself referred to his this group of paintings as ‘poesie’, the visual equivalent of poetry.

Police Gazette - Willem de Kooning

Price in US $ - 63.5 million



Willem de Kooning’s Police Gazette, an abstract 1955 landscape, is one of his more abstract canvases, primarily yellow, red and green. It was painted while he was living in New York City before moving to East Hampton, N.Y. By early 1930s Kooning had started experimenting with abstract expressions, using living shapes and simple geometric compositions that suggested the artist’s absolute contrast sense of creating formal elements that prevails in his work throughout his career. de Kooning is considered second only to Pollock in the Abstract Expressionist canon.

.

Nude Sitting on a Divan - Amedeo Modigliani

Price in US $ -69 million

Nude Sitting on a Divan (The Beautiful Roman Woman) is an oil on canvas painting by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. The work was one of a series of nudes painted by Modigliani in 1917 that created a sensation when exhibited in Paris that year.  Simultaneously abstracted and erotically detailed, they exhibit a formal grace referencing nude figures of the Italian Renaissance

The Paris show of 1917 was Modigliani's only solo exhibition during his life, and is "notorious" in modern art history for its sensational public reception and the attendant issues of obscenity.

No 1 (Royal Red and Blue) - Mark Rothko

Price in US $ - 75.1 million

Mark Rothko’s magisterial abstraction, “No.1 (Royal Red and Blue)” (1954) is one of the most widely exhibited and written-about painting from the collection of Anne and John Marion.  Its impressive history included the artist’s first museum exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it showed alongside eight other Rothkos in 1954, in what was then a contemporary artist showcase. Most of the other examples are now housed in museums, including the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was described by Sotheby's as "a seminal, large-scale masterpiece".

.

The Darmstadt Madonna - Hans Holbein the Younger.

Price in US $ - 75 million

The Darmstadt Madonna (also known as "The Madonna With the Family of Mayor Meyer") is a masterpiece oil painting by Hans Holbein the Younger.

The painting was influenced by Italian Renaissance religious painting, with elements of Netherlandish portrait painting. The painting was earlier located in Darmstadt - hence its title.

Orange, Red, Yellow - Mark Rothko

Price in US $ - 86 million

Orange, Red, Yellow, a 1961 Color Field painting by Mark Rothko, has become the most expensive post-war work sold at auction. The painting's trio of orange and yellow rectangles bobbing atop a cherry-red background forms a palette that's as eye-catching as a sunset or a Popsicle. Rothko's shimmering "colour field" paintings have never been as attention grabbing as his macho Action Painting contemporaries Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

These subtly spiritual works, when properly lit, are thought to offer a similar lofty experience that one gets in a place of worship, like a cathedral. Only their refusal to associate with language, or any period in art history, mean they transcend the specificity of religion.

Portrait of Alfonso d'Avalos, Marquis of Vasto, in Armor with a Page - Titian

Price in US $ - 70 million

Titian's Portrait of Alfonso d'Avalos (Governor of Milan and commander general of imperial forces in Italy under the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V), painted in Bologna in the winter of 1533, signals the inception of one of the most influential prototypes in the history of Western art-the standing state portrait. Titian, along with Raphael, set the standard for court portraiture during the subsequent development of Western painting. This portrait heralds such remarkable later paintings as Anthony van Dyck's Portrait of Agostino Pallavicini, Domenico Fetti's Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music, and Guercino's Pope Gregory XV.

The Scream - Edvard Munch

Price in US $ -  119.9million

The Scream by Expressionist artist Edvard Munch is the name given to four versions of a composition, created as both paintings and pastels, between 1893 and 1910.The Scream has been the target of several high-profile art thefts. In 1994, the version in the National Gallery (Oslo) was stolen. It was recovered several months later. In 2004, both The Scream and Madonna (also by Munch) were stolen from the Munch Museum, and recovered two years later. In the painting, even the sky expresses the narcissism of despair, the figures in the background seem as melancholy and lost as the screamer. And the face does not scream, rather it is a scream.

The Card Players - Paul Cézanne

Price in US $ - 250 million

The Card Players is a series of oil paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne. Whereas previous paintings of the genre had illustrated heightened moments of drama, Cézanne's portraits have been noted for their lack of drama, narrative, and conventional characterization.One critic described the scenes as "human still life", while another speculated the men's intense focus on their game mirrors that of the painter's absorption in his art.

.

Woman with Folded Arms - Pablo Picasso

Price in US $ - 55 million






Woman with Folded Arms (Femme aux Bras Croisés ) was painted by Pablo Picasso in 1902 during his Blue Period.

The unknown model was an inmate of the Saint-Lazare hospital-prison in Paris - probably someone who had recently attempted suicide and now carried the blank but menacing stare of those unfortunates who found themselves at Saint-Lazare during the early 1900s.

While the identity of the woman in the painting is unknown, the inspiration for the Picasso Blue Period came from the tragic suicide of his friend and roommate Carlos Casagemas. Only 19 years old at the age of his death, the young Picasso then went through a 3 year period in which all of his paintings were awash with blue shades suggesting the misery and grief of his subjects.

At the Lapin Agile - Pablo Picasso

Price in US $ - 40.7 million





















At the turn of the twentieth century the Lapin Agile, a Montmartre cabaret in France, was a favorite spot for struggling artists and writers, including Picasso, Modigliani, Apollinaire, and Utrillo.

Pablo Picasso's 1905 oil painting "At the Lapin Agile" helped to make this cabaret world famous.

Picasso's composition was of posterlike simplicity. He aligned glasses and figures—hatted and shown from full-face to profile view—along severe diagonals, ending with a seated guitarist, Frédé, the café's owner.

Steve Martin wrote a play 'Picasso at the Lapin Agile' based on this painting.



.

The Gross Clinic - Thomas Eakins

Price in US $ - 68 million























The Gross Clinic is an oil on canvas painting by American artist Thomas Eakins. Included among the group is a self-portrait of Eakins, who is seated to the right of the tunnel railing, sketching or writing.

The painting is shocking for both its bold presentation and the matter-of-fact goriness of the procedure. Adding to the drama is the lone woman in the painting seen in the middle ground, possibly the patient's mother, cringing in distress. Her dramatic figure functions as a strong contrast to the calm, professional demeanor of the men who surround the patient. This bloody and very blunt depiction of surgery was shocking at the time it was first exhibited.

Diana and Actaeon - Titian

Price in US $ - 70.6 million





















The story of how Actaeon was turned into a stag for glimpsing the naked goddess Diana has inspired artists through the centuries. Diana and Actaeon is considered to be one of the greatest works by the Italian Renaissance master Titian.

Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects.

White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) - Mark Rothko

Price in US $ - 72.8 million



















White Center is part of Rothko's signature multiform style: several blocks of layered, complementary colors on a large canvas

Mark Rothko is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label. One of the most crucial philosophical influence on Rothko was Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.

Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers - Vincent van Gogh

Price in US $ - 39.7 million






















Based on a still life theme, Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers was created by Van Gogh in August 1888.

It was created in a spectacular series by the Dutch artist. This oil painting series includes similar paintings of fifteen sunflowers in a vase, depicting the illustration of sunflowers passing through several stages of life, beginning with full blooming to withering out. The artist brilliantly produced it in several shades and hues. The painting is regarded especially for its innovative nature, which significantly highlights the use of the yellow spectrum, as well as the newly invented use of colors.