Pablo Picasso topped the list of the most sought-after artists of art market

French portal Artprice.com published the top 50 artists on sales turnover at global auctions for the first half of 2017.

Pablo Picasso - the record holder of the art market and at prices (in particular, it is his "Algerian Women (version O)", sold at Christie's in 2015 for $ 179.4 million, are considered the most expensive work ever sold at public auction), and the number of annually appearing in the sale of works. The latter circumstance is due to the artist's extraordinary creative fecundity, as well as to his experiments in a variety of techniques (besides painting and drawings, his legacy includes ceramics and drawing graphics).

This year, Picasso once again became the first in the list: for the first half of the year, a total of 1495 (!) Of his works were sold for $ 280 million. The largest sale of this year is still the "Seated woman in a blue dress" (Femme assise, robe bleue ). The picture was bought at the auction in May Christie's in New York for $ 45 million.

The second line of the rating was occupied by Jean-Michel Basquiat with a turnover of $ 243.8 million. Almost half of this amount was ensured by the record sale of an unnamed work of 1982 for $ 110.5 million to Japanese billionaire Yusak Maedzawa at the Sotheby's auction in New York in May. In the first half of the year, 58 works by Basquiat were sold.

Three leaders are closed by another regular of such lists - Andy Warhol. A cult artist of the twentieth century, very expensive and, like Picasso, with a huge body of work, much of which is also a drawing schedule. Only for 6 months of 2017 at international auctions 597 of his works were sold for a total of $ 123.9 million.

The ten artists with the largest auction turnover also included Zhang Datsyan, Vasily Kandinsky, Gerhard Richter, Roy Lichtenstein, Claude Monet, Fu Baoshi and Huang Binhong.