Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is a painting by Gustav Klimt completed in 1907. According to press reports it was sold for US$135 million to Ronald Lauder for his Neue Galerie in New York City in June 2006, which would make it at that time the most expensive painting ever sold. It has been on display at the gallery since July 2006.

The painting
Klimt took three years to complete the painting. It measures 138 x 138 cm and is made of oil and gold on canvas, showing elaborate and complex ornamentation as seen in the Jugendstil style. Klimt was a member of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists that broke away from the traditional way of painting. The picture was painted in Vienna and commissioned by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. As a wealthy industrialist who had made his fortune in the sugar industry, he sponsored the arts and favored and supported Gustav Klimt. Adele Bloch-Bauer became the only model who was painted twice by Klimt when he completed a second picture of her, Adele Bloch-Bauer II, in 1912.

Ownership of the painting
Adele Bloch-Bauer had indicated in her will that Klimt's paintings should be donated to the Austrian State Gallery. She died in 1925 from meningitis. When the Nazis took over Austria, her widowed husband had to flee to Switzerland. His property, including the Klimt paintings, was confiscated. In his 1945 testament, Bauer-Bloch designated his nephew and nieces, including Maria Altmann, as the inheritors of his estate.
As Bloch-Bauer's pictures had remained in Austria, the government took the position that the testament of Adele Bloch-Bauer had determined that these pictures were to stay there. After a protracted court battle in the United States and in Austria (see Republic of Austria v. Altmann), binding arbitration by the Austrian court established in 2006 that Maria Altmann was the rightful owner of this and four other paintings by Klimt. After the pictures were sent to America, they were on display in Los Angeles in 2006 before the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was sold to Lauder.
The painting will be a centerpiece in Ronald Lauder's collection for his Neue Gallerie in New York. This collection has for years attempted to recover Jewish-owned art, mostly from Germany and Austria, that had been confiscated or looted by the Nazi government. Lauder worked towards this goal while he was the US ambassador to Austria, as a member of the "World Jewish Restitution Organization", and as a member of a Clinton commission to examine cases of Nazi looting. Lauder's comment on the acquisition for his Neue Gallerie collection: "This is our Mona Lisa".
In June 2006 New York's Neue Galerie is reported to have paid $135m for the fifth looted Klimt portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Adele Bloch-Bauer II sold for almost $88m in November 2006 at Christie's.

Garson a la Pipe (Boy with a Pipe) is a painting by Pablo Picasso. It was painted in 1905, during the 24-year-old artist's Rose Period, soon after he settled in the Montmartre section of Paris, France. The oil on canvas painting depicts a Parisian boy holding a pipe in his left hand.

Ownership history
Owned by the estate of John Hay Whitney, on May 5, 2004 it sold for $US104.1 million at an auction in Sotheby's in New York City, after having been given a pre-sale estimate of $70 million by the auction house.
Many art critics have stated that the painting's high sale price has much more to do with the artist's name than with the merit or historical importance of the painting. The Washington Post's article on the sale contained the following characterisation of the reaction:

Dora Maar au Chat (Dora Maar with Cat) is a 1941 painting by Pablo Picasso. It depicts Dora Maar, the painter's Croatian mistress, seated on a chair with a small cat perched on her shoulders. This painting is world-famous and is now one of the world's most expensive paintings.
In the painting, Dora Maar sits on a chair with a black cat on her shoulder. Picasso liked to use large patches of paint and contrasting colours to create the outstanding and special effect of this painting. It also shows the true style of life at that time. For instance, the way Dora Maar dressed and her blue, sharp fingers that looked like cat claws truly reflected the artistic style that Picasso expressed in this painting. This cubist painting also shows that Dora Maar is a "double sided" woman - it shows her wisdom and that she liked to cry. Maar did not like cats, and Picasso's inclusion of one in the portrait was to show that he was in control of this woman. The "cat claws" on Maar show that the relationship between her and Picasso reached its climax. In addition to this, the Second World War was going on which reflected the hard lives that both of them were suffering in Paris.

History
The canvas (50 ? by 37 ? inches / 128.3cm by 95.3cm) was one of many portraits of Dora Maar painted by Pablo Picasso over their nearly decade-long relationship. Picasso fell in love with the 29-year old Maar at the age of 55 and soon began living with her. This painting was done during the year 1941, when the Nazis were occupying France. In the 1940s, the painting was obtained by Chicago collectors Leigh and Mary Block. They sold the painting in 1963. After that, the painting was never shown until the 21st century.
During 2005 and 2006, the Dora Maar au Chat, then owned by the Gidwitz family of Chicago, was shown worldwide as part of Sotheby's exhibitions in London, Hong Kong and New York. It came up for sale in an auction of Impressionist/Modern works held at Sotheby's on May 3, 2006 in New York and making it the second-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. An anonymous Russian bidder present at the New York auction won the work with a final bid of US$95,216,000, well exceeding the pre-auction US$50 million estimates.
The identity of the bidder, who spent more than US$100 million in total and purchased an 1883 Monet seascape and a 1978 Chagall in addition to the Picasso, was a topic of much speculation. Apparently a novice bidder, though possibly acting as an agent for a more well-known collector, the anonymous buyer may have been unknown at the start of the auction even to Sotheby's officials. As of mid-2007, the ownership of the Dora Maar au Chat is still unknown to the general public, although rumors have focused on the Georgian mining magnate Bidzina (Boris) Ivanishvili, who sold his Moscow bank a week before the auction for $550 m . He resides at a large house built into a rock bluff in his native Republic of Georgia.

Descriptions of painting
Dora Maar au Chat presents the artist's most mysterious and challenging mistress regally posed three-quarter length in a large wooden chair with a small black cat perched behind her in both an amusing and menacing attitude. The faceted planes of her body and richly layered surface of brushstrokes impart a monumental and sculptural quality to this portrait. The painting is also remarkable for its brilliance of colour and the complex and dense patterning of the model's dress. The powerful figure is set in a dramatic, yet simple setting composed of a vertiginously inclined plane of wooden floorboards and shallow interior space that is arranged in a manner reminiscent of Picasso's earliest manipulations of space in a cubist manner.
Dora Maar au Chat is one of Picasso's most valued depictions of his lover and artistic companion. Their partnership had been one of intellectual exchange and intense passion -- Dora was an artist, spoke Picasso's native Spanish, and shared his political concerns. She even assisted with the execution of the monumental Guernica and produced the only photo-documentary of the work in progress. She was an intellectual force - a characteristic that both stimulated and challenged Picasso and her influence on him resulted in some of his most powerful and daring portraits of his 75-year career. Among the best of them are the oils completed during the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Picasso's art resonated with the drama and emotional upheaval of the era and which Dora came to personify. The luminous Dora Maar au Chat was painted in 1941, at the beginning of the Second World War in France .
Maar was one of the most influential figures in Picasso's life during their relationship and she also became his primary model. By the time he painted the present picture he had incorporated Dora Maar's image into countless versions of this motif. During the occupation of Paris by the Nazis, and as tension mounted in their relationship, the artist would express his frustration by furiously abstracting her image, often portraying her in tears. While the present portrait might seem a departure from Picasso's more hostile depictions of this model, it may be one of his most brilliant and biting provocations of his Weeping Woman. Picasso once likened Maar's allure and temperament to that of an "Afghan cat", and the cat in this picture is laden with significance. In the history of art, the pairing of cats and women was an allusion to feminine wiles and sexual aggression, as exemplified in Manet's notorious Olympia. It is also interesting to consider that the artist has paid particular attention to the sharp, talon-like nails on the long fingers of his model. In life Maar's well-manicured hands were one of her most beautiful and distinctive features, and here they have taken on another, more violent characteristic.
In addition to being a rare, three-quarter length portrait of Dora Maar, the present work is also a generous and painterly composition with an extraordinary attention to detail. The artist used an extraordinarily vibrant palette in his rendering of the angles of the chair and the patterning of Maar's dress. The most embellished and symbolic element of the sitter's wardrobe in this picture is her hat, Maar's most famous accessory and signifier of her involvement in the Surrealist movement. Ceremoniously placed atop her head like a crown, it is festooned with colourful plumes and outlined with a band of vibrant red. Larger than life, an impression enhanced by her vibrant body that cannot be confined by the boundaries of the chair, Maar looms in this picture like a pagan goddess seated on her throne.

Portrait of Dr. Gachet is one of the most revered paintings by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, since it fetched a record price of $82.5 million ($75 million, plus a 10 percent buyer's commission) in 1990.
There are two authentic versions of this portrait, both executed in June 1890 during the last months of Van Gogh's life. Both show Doctor Gachet sitting at a table and leaning his head onto his right arm, but they are easily differentiated.

Genesis
The portraits were painted in Auvers-sur-Oise close to Paris, and depict Doctor Paul Gachet with a foxglove plant. Gachet took care of van Gogh during the artist's last months. Gachet was a hobby painter and became good friends with van Gogh. The foxglove in the painting is a plant from which digitalis is extracted for the treatment of certain heart complaints; the foxglove is thereby an attribute of Gachet as a doctor.

Melancholy
Van Gogh's thoughts returned several times to the painting by Eug?ne Delacroix of Torquato Tasso in the madhouse. After a visit with Paul Gauguin to Montpellier to see Alfred Bruyas's collection in the Mus?e Fabre, Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, asking if he could find a copy of the lithograph after the painting.. Three and a half months earlier, he had been thinking of the painting as an example of the sort of portraits he wanted to paint: "But it would be more in harmony with what Eug?ne Delacroix attempted and brought off in his Tasso in Prison, and many other pictures, representing a real man. Ah! portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come."
Van Gogh wrote to his brother in 1890 about the painting:

Cultural use
The first version plays an important role in the crime novel Lifeguard (2005) by James Patterson and Andrew Gross.

Resources

Pedigrees
The original version of this painting was sold by van Gogh's sister-in-law for 300 francs in 1897. Subsequently it was sold respectively to Paul Cassirer (1904), Kessler (1904), and Druet (1910). In 1911 the painting was acquired by the St?del (St?dtische Galerie) in Frankfurt, Germany and hung there until 1933, when the painting was put in a hidden room. In 1937, it was confiscated by the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, an arm of the Nazi government that sought to rid pre-war Germany of so-called degenerate art. It came into the possession of Hermann G?ring, who quickly sold it to a dealer in Amsterdam. The dealer in turn sold it to a collector, Siegfried Kramarsky, who brought it with him, when he fled to New York, where the work was often lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kramarsky's family put the painting up for auction in 1990. The painting became famous on May 15, 1990, when Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito paid US$82.5 million for it at auction in Christie's New York, making it the most expensive painting in the world up to that time. Saito, the honorary chairman of Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Co. and then 75 years old, caused a scandal when he said he would have the Van Gogh painting cremated with him after his death. He later said, "What I really wanted to [express] was my wish to preserve the paintings forever." Saito, his aides explained, was using a figure of speech, and his threatening to torch the masterpiece was just an expression of intense affection for it. Later he said he would consider giving the paintings to his government or a museum. After his death in 1996, the exact location and ownership of the portrait had been shrouded in mystery. In early 2007, however, reports surfaced that the painting had been sold a decade earlier by Saito or his estate to the Austrian-born investment fund manager Wolfgang Fl?ttl. Fl?ttl, in turn, had reportedly been forced by financial reversals to sell the painting to parties as yet unknown.
The second version of the portrait is in the possession of the Mus?e d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Notes

References
Saltzman, Cynthia: Portrait of Dr. Gachet. The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece: Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed, and Loss, . ISBN 0-670-86223-1

External links
U.S. News and World Report: Van Gogh's vanishing act

Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre (commonly known as Le Moulin de la Galette) is an 1876 painting by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir at the Mus?e d'Orsay in Paris
Bal au Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre is also a smaller version of Renoir's Impressionist painting of the same name in a private collection.

Ownership history
(for smaller version of painting, larger version is in Mus?e d'Orsay, Paris)
Owned by John Hay Whitney, on May 17, 1990, his widow sold the painting for US$78 million at Sotheby's in New York City, New York to Ryoei Saito, the honorary chairman of Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Company, Japan.
At the time of sale, it was one of the top two most expensive artworks ever sold, together with van Gogh's Portrait of Dr Gachet, which was also purchased by Saito. Saito caused international outrage when he suggested in 1991 that he intended to cremate both paintings with him when he died. However, when Saito and his companies ran into severe financial difficulties, bankers who held the painting as collateral for loans arranged a confidential sale through Sotheby's to an undisclosed buyer. Although not known for certain, the painting is believed to be in the hands of a Swiss collector.
The Bal au moulin de la Galette is currently fifth on the list of most expensive paintings ever sold.

The Massacre of the Innocents is either of two paintings by Peter Paul Rubens depicting an episode of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents as related in the Gospel of Matthew.

The lost masterpiece
The 1st version painted by Rubens dates from around 1611. In the eighteenth century, the painting was part of the Liechtenstein Collection in Vienna, Austria, along with another Rubens' masterpiece, Samson and Delilah.
After having been miscatalogued by Vincenzio Fanti in 1767, it was attributed to one of Rubens' assistants, Jan van den Hoecke, after Rubens. There, however, it remained until it was sold to an Austrian family in 1920. It was subsequently loaned in 1923 to Stift Reichersberg, a monastery in northern Austria.
In 2001, the painting was seen by George Gordon, an expert in Flemish and Dutch paintings at Sotheby's in London. He was persuaded that it was indeed a Rubens by its similar characteristics and style to the Samson and Delilah picture, painted at around the same time.
It was sold at auction at Sotheby's, London on July 10, 2002 for ?49.5 million (then equal to some $86 million U.S.). The buyer's identity was initially not known, as Sam Fogg, a London manuscripts' dealer, had placed the winning bid of ?45 million (before the buyer's premium). The buyer was later revealed to be the Canadian press baron Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet. The price was, and currently is (as of January 2007), the most expensive Old Master painting ever sold at auction.
Following the auction the painting was loaned to the National Gallery, London, with the intention that, three years later, it would be loaned to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. However, the painting will continue to hang in the National Gallery, London until the completion of the Frank Gehry-designed redevelopment of the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2008.

Analysis
It is widely regarded as a demonstration of the artist's learnings from his time spent in Italy between 1600 and 1608, where he observed first-hand the works of Italian Baroque painters like Caravaggio. These influences are seen in this painting through the sheer drama and emotive dynamism of the scene, as well as the rich colour. There is also evidence of the use of chiaroscuro.

Later version
Towards the end of his life, between 1636 and 1638, Rubens painted a second version of the Massacre of the Innocents. This version was acquired by the Alte Pinakothek, Munich by 1706, and it continues to hang there today.
A copy of this later version was made as an engraving in 1643 by Paulus Pontius.

Self-portraits by Vincent van Gogh are, together with his Sunflowers, amongst his most-admired paintings. From 1886 to 1889 he produced over 12 self-portraits.

Paris
The first self-portrait by Van Gogh that survived, is dated 1886.

Arles

Saint-R?my
All Self-Portraits executed in Saint-R?my show the artist's head from the left, i.e. the side with ear not mutilated.
Van Gogh painted Self-Portrait without beard just after he had shaved himself. The self-portrait is one of the most expensive paintings of all time, selling for $71.5 million in 1998 in New York. At the time, it was the third (or an inflation-adjusted fourth) most expensive painting ever sold.

Auvers-sur-Oise
No self-portraits were executed by Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, during the final weeks of his life.

Fakes
Almost at the same time, when his Catalogue raisonn? was published, Jacob Baart de la Faille had to admit that he had included paintings emerging from dubious sources, and of dubious quality. Little later, in 1930, De la Faille rejected some thirty odd paintings, which he had originally included in his Catalogue raisonn? - together with a hundred of others he had already excluded: Self-portraits - and Sunflowers - held a prominent place in the set he now rejected. In 1970, the editor's of De la Faille's posthumous manuscript brand marked most of these dubious Self-portraits as forgeries, but could not settle all disputes, at least on one:
The Selfportrait 'a l'?stampe japonais', then in the collection of William Goetz, Los Angeles, was included, though all editors refused its authenticity.
Meanwhile, the authenticity of a second "self-portrait" has been challenged:
The Selfportrait, '? l'oreille mutil?', acquired in 1910 for the Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, has been unanimously rejected by recent scholars and technical researchers since decades, until provenance research by staff members now reported pro domo the contrary. The debate is on-going.

Resources
Due to the considerable number of self-portraits by Van Gogh's, for a valid identification reference is to the numbers of Jacob Baart de la Faille's Catalogue raisonn? (1928 & 1970) (F) or to Jan Hulsker's updated compilation (1978, revised 1989) (JH).

References
Hammacher, A. M.: Van Gogh: Selbstbildnisse, Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1960; 2nd edition 1970
Van Lindert, Juleke, & Van Uitert, Evert: Een eigentijdse expressie: Vincent van Gogh en zijn portretten, Meulenhoff/Landshoff, Amsterdam 1990 ISBN 90-290-8350-6
Dorn, Roland: Vincent, portraitiste: Bemerkungen zu ein paar heissen Eisen, in: Lukas Gloor, ed.: Van Gogh echt falsch: Zwei Selbstbildnisse der Sammlung Emil B?hrle, Z?rich 2005, pp. 7 - 21

Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier is a painting created in about 1893 to 1894 by French artist Paul C?zanne (January 19, 1839 - October 22, 1906). It is considered the most expensive still life ever sold at an auction.
C?zanne was famous for drawing still lifes, especially those which expressed complex emotions while still being based upon reality. These type of paintings would eventually lead up to the creation of new art styles during the 20th century such as Picasso's cubism.

Ownership history
The painting went through the possession of Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard, Cornelis Hoogendijk, Paul Rosenberg, Dr Albert C. Barnes, and the Carroll Carstairs Gallery. This painting was sold at Sotheby's, New York on May 10, 1999 for $60,502,500, a record price, during the soldout of the Whitney family collection. The painting was later resold at a loss.

Femme aux Bras Croises (Woman with Folded Arms), is a painting by Pablo Picasso done in 1902 during his Blue Period. The subject of the painting is unknown, but may be an inmate of the Saint-Lazare hospital-prison in Paris.
In her book Pablo Picasso, Antonina Vallentin devotes a great deal of time to writing about the haunting qualities of this painting. She describes her views of the subject as an inmate, who recently attempted suicide and now carries the blank but menacing stare of those unfortunates who found themselves at Saint-Lazare during the early 1900s.

Ownership history
Gertrude Stein originally bought the painting from Picasso. In 2000 it sold in auction at Christie's, New York, for more than 55 million dollars.

Irises is a painting by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. It was one of his first works while he was at the asylum at Saint Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-R?my-de-Provence, France in the last year before his death in 1890.
It was painted before his first attack at the asylum. There is a lack of the high tension which is seen in his later works. He called the painting "the lightning conductor for my illness", because he felt that he could keep himself from going insane by continuing to paint.
The painting was influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, like many of his works and those by other artists of the time. The similarities occur with strong outlines, unusual angles, including close-up views and also flattish local colour (not modelled according to the fall of light).
He considered this painting a study, which is probably why there are no known drawings for it, although Theo, Van Gogh's brother, thought better of it and quickly submitted it to the annual exhibition of the Soci?t? des Artistes Ind?pendants in September 1889, together with Starry Night over the Rhone. He wrote to Vincent of the exhibition: "[It] strikes the eye from afar. The Irises are a beautiful study full of air and life."

Ownership history
Its first owner was the French art critic and anarchist Octave Mirbeau, who was also one of Van Gogh's first supporters: he paid 300 francs for it.
In 1987, it became the most expensive painting ever sold, setting a record which stood for two and a half years. Then it was sold for AUS$ 54,000,000 to Alan Bond, but he did not have enough money to pay for it and it had to be re-sold. Irises is currently (as of 2006) seventh on the inflation-adjusted list of most expensive paintings ever sold, and in tenth place if the effects of inflation are ignored.
Irisis now is owened by the J. Paul Getty Trust and is on display at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, USA.