Picasso is generally considered the top-grossing artist of all time.

Pablo Picasso's 1932 masterpiece "Femme à la Montre"
Credit: © Aaron Chown—PA Images/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
November 3, 2026

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In 2015, Pablo Picasso’s 1955 painting “Women of Algiers (Version O)” sold for $179 million at an auction held at Christie’s in New York. It’s one of at least six works by the cubist painter to sell for more than $100 million. Indeed, Picasso is commonly ranked as the highest-grossing artist of all time, with sales reaching $532 million in 2021 alone. Sixty of his works were sold that year at an average price of $8.8 million per piece, often as the result of fierce bidding wars. He’s the bestselling artist according to auction house Sotheby’s and, per Artprice, generated more revenue than any other artist in 2023. 

Picasso, who died in 1973 at age 91, is widely hailed as one of the greatest artists in history and is certainly among the most famous. “To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace,” art critic Robert Hughes wrote in 1998. “No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime.”

Picasso’s other top-selling paintings are “Woman With a Watch” (1932), which sold for $139.3 million in 2023; “Woman Sitting Near a Window (Marie-Thérèse)” (1932), which went for $103.4 million in 2021; “Young Girl With a Flower Basket” (1905), which fetched $115 million in 2018; “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” (1932), auctioned for $106.5 million in 2010; and “Boy With a Pipe” (1905), auctioned for $104.2 million in 2004. 

Sixteen of Picasso’s pieces have sold for more than $50 million, and 39 have earned more than $30 million. It’s estimated that sales of his artwork generated more than $4.7 billion between 2013 and 2023.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” is the most expensive painting ever sold.

Picasso may be the highest-grossing visual artist overall, but he doesn’t hold the title for the most expensive painting ever sold. That would be Leonardo da Vinci, whose “Salvator Mundi” was auctioned for an eye-popping $450.3 million on November 15, 2017. The portrait of Jesus Christ was painted sometime between 1499 and 1510 and is sometimes referred to as “Male Mona Lisa,” with François de Poortere, head of the Old Masters department at Christie’s, calling it “the holy grail of Old Master paintings.” Other hugely expensive works of art include Willem de Kooning’s “Interchange” ($300 million), Paul Cézanne’s “The Card Players” ($250 million), and “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” by Gustav Klimt ($236.4 million).

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