Who are the most-searched artists on artnet’s Price Database?
Every day, thousands of artnet users search for auction results for hundreds of artists. Their habits offer a sometimes surprising snapshot of shifting market interest and popularity.
The top names, of course, read like a blue-chip hall of fame. Unsurprisingly given his popularity, influence, market value, and remarkable productivity, Pablo Picasso occupies the top spot with a total of 686,882 searches. He is followed by Andy Warhol, with 588,373 searches. (All data is accurate as of September 2017.)
Boosted by a very lively print market, Marc Chagall comes in third. Only one sculptor (Alexander Calder) and two living artists (Gerhard Richter and Damien Hirst) managed to crack the top 10.
The list contains a notable absence of diversity in terms of the artists’ gender, race, and chosen medium. There are only seven women (Yayoi Kusama, Cindy Sherman, Jeanne-Claude, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Louise Bourgeois). Georgia O’Keeffe, whose work is the most expensive by a female artist ever sold at auction, is noticeably absent from the list.
Meanwhile, the list contains only one African American artist (Jean-Michel Basquiat), six Asian artists (Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Zao Wou-Ki, Yoshitomo Nara, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Hiroshi Sugimoto), and two Latin American artists (Fernando Botero and Vic Muniz). Only nine artists work primarily in a medium other than painting.
But there are some surprises, too. The Hungarian-French Op artist Victor Vasarely (who comes in at number 36) and the French expressionist Bernard Buffet (37) are more frequently searched than Cy Twombly (38), Francis Bacon (39), and Cindy Sherman (40). The French cityscape painter Maurice Utrillo (75) also makes an unexpected appearance.
There are also notable omissions. Contemporary art auction superstars including Rudolf Stingel, Mark Grotjahn, Mark Bradford, and Peter Doig failed to make the list entirely.
See who made the cut below.
1. Pablo Picasso
2. Andy Warhol
3. Marc Chagall
4. Joan Miró
5. Roy Lichtenstein
6. Alexander Calder
7. Gerhard Richter
8. Salvador Dalí
9. Henri Matisse
10. Damien Hirst
11. Pierre-Auguste Renoir
12. Lucio Fontana
13. Jean-Michel Basquiat
14. Henry Moore
15. Fernand Léger
16. Jean Dubuffet
17. David Hockney
18. Keith Haring
19. Ed Ruscha
20. Claude Monet
21. Tom Wesselmann
22. Yayoi Kusama
23. Robert Rauschenberg
24. Alberto Giacometti
25. Sam Francis
26. Edgar Degas
27. Willem de Kooning
28. Richard Prince
29. Auguste Rodin
30. Frank Stella
31. Jeff Koons
32. Jasper Johns
33. Arman
34. Raoul Dufy
35. René Magritte
36. Victor Vasarely
37. Bernard Buffet
38. Cy Twombly
39. Francis Bacon
40. Cindy Sherman
41. Max Ernst
42. Georges Braque
43. Sol LeWitt
44. Camille Pissarro
45. Man Ray
46. Robert Motherwell
47. Karel Appel
48. Takashi Murakami
49. Fernando Botero
50. Kees van Dongen
51. Donald Judd
52. Sigmar Polke
53. Henri deToulouse-Lautrec
54. Zao Wou-Ki
55. Yves Klein
56. Jim Dine
57. Pierre Bonnard
58. Rembrandt van Rijn
59. Christopher Wool
60. Wassily Kandinsky
61. Amedeo Modigliani
62. Maurice de Vlaminck
63. Yoshitomo Nara
64. Robert Indiana
65. Banksy
66. Christo and Jeanne-Claude
67. Alighiero Boetti
68. Josef Albers
69. Vik Muniz
70. Antoni Tàpies
71. Joseph Beuys
72. Paul Klee
73. Jean (Hans) Arp
74. Alex Katz
75. Maurice Utrillo
76. Roberto Matta
77. Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita
78. George Condo
79. Hiroshi Sugimoto
80. Robert Mapplethorpe
81. Joan Mitchell
82. Wayne Thiebaud
83. Mark Rothko
84. Egon Schiele
85. Georg Baselitz
86. Andreas Gursky
87. Francis Picabia
88. Emil Nolde
89. Helen Frankenthaler
90. Ansel Adams
91. Irving Penn
92. Richard Diebenkorn
93. Paul Cézanne
94. Niki de Saint Phalle
95. Giorgio de Chirico
96. Paul Gauguin
97. Anselm Kiefer
98. Lucian Freud
99. Edvard Munch
100. Louise Bourgeois