Gray Numbers, an abstract painting by American artist Japser Johns, 73, became the most expensive picture by a living artist when it was bought by bought by David Geffen, the pop music entrepreneur and founder of DreamWorks, for $40 million (£22.5 million).
The London Times, quoting ARTnews magazine, said Johns, often described as America's greatest living artist, is best known for his variations on the Stars and Stripes.
ARTnews, which has compiled a list of the ten highest prices paid for single works of living artists, lists the second-most expensive as 'Cy Twombly, 76, the artist from Virginia considered to be the heir to Jackson Pollock, who is enjoying a retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London, 'said the Times.
Twombly's 12-panelled Lepanto (2001), depicting the 16th-century sea battle in which Christian Europeans led by the Venetians defeated the Ottoman fleet, sold for more than $20 million, the paper said.
According to the Times, 'Third is Robert Rauschenberg, 78, the Texan whose collage in oils and photographs Factum II (1957) was bought for $12 million by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1999. Bruce Nauman, 62, from New Mexico, is fifth and is the world's highest-paid sculptor. His iron-cast sculpture of a parcel tied with rope, Henry Moore Bound to Fail (1967), was bought for $9.9 million in 2001.'
Most artists must wait until they are dead before their work fetches the highest prices, says the Times. The most expensive picture is Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr Gachet, which was sold in 1990, 100 years after it was painted, for $82.5 million. That record is likely to be broken by Pablo Picasso's 1905 Boy With a Pipe, which Sotheby's in New York is predicting will sell for more than $70 million, and could even fetch more than $100 million on May 4, the report said.
