A King's Ransom

10 Most expensive paintings (sale prices expressed in dollars and adjusted for inflation):

1. The Card Players, Paul Cezanne $268.1 million (2011)
2. No. 5, 1948, Jackson Pollock: $161.7 million (2006)
3. Woman III, Willem de Kooning: $158.8 million (2006)
4. Le Rêve, Pablo Picasso $155.0 million (2013)
5. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Gustav Klimt: $154.9 million (2006)
6. Portrait of Dr. Gachet, Vincent van Gogh: $148.6 million (1990)
7. Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, Pierre-Auguste Renoir: $140.7 million (1990)
8. Garçon à la pipe, Pablo Picasso: $128.2 million (2004)
9. The Scream, Edvard Munch: $121.4 million (2012)
10. Flag, Jasper Johns $117.6 (2010)

Ryoei Saito, a Japanese businessman who purchased the Renoir and Van Gogh casually remarked he wanted the paintings to be put in his coffin and cremated with him when he died. He retracted the comment when it caused an international uproar, saying it was only a joke for the tax authorities, but few people thought it was funny. He had already locked the two paintings away from the public in a warehouse like the fabled ark in the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark,", invisible to those who might appreciate its power. Although he made a vague commitment to put them on show 'in about 10 years' time'. Saito died in 1996 and it unclear who the current owner is but representatives of Saito's company assured the world that they are still around.

Paradox

Gertrude Stein, 1905–6

Pablo Picasso

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Picasso said of his portrait of Gertrude Stein, “Everybody thinks that the portrait is not like her, but never mind, in the end she will look like the portrait.”. He began the portrait in 1905. She posed for this portrait ninety times. One day as described by Gertrude he said "I can't see you anymore when I look", he said irritably, and so the picture was left like that. He completed the head after a trip to Spain in fall 1906. His reduction of the figure to simple masses and the face to a mask with heavy lidded eyes reflects his recent encounter with African, Roman, and Iberian sculpture and foreshadows his adoption of Cubism. He painted the head, which differs in style from the body and hands, without the sitter, testimony to the fact that it was his personal vision, rather than empirical reality, that guided his work. When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will."
When you look at her photographs, I see that the portrait carries her mood, and being that the painting foretells of his up and coming cubist style, it is enough to say it is her.