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Cezanne's The Card Players has been sold to Qatar's royal family for more than $250 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art.
Details are only just emerging on the 2011 deal between the painting’s seller – Greek shipping tycoon George Embiricos – and Qatari royals, Vanity Fair reported.
The painting is one of five in a series of post-impressionist works. The other four reside in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, the Courtauld and the Barnes foundation.
Despite its artistic importance, the quarter of a billion dollar price tag remains hefty. Victor Wiener, a fine art appraiser, said: “Now, everyone will use this price as a point of departure: it changes the whole art-market structure.”
For Qatar, buying art is part of its bid to launch itself into the world’s cultural stage before it hosts the 2022 World Cup. This is by no means the first big-budget artwork the energy-rich Gulf state has snapped up.
In 2011, The Art Newspaper ranked Qatar the world’s biggest buyer in the art market in terms of value.
Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, 28-year-old daughter of the Emir of Qatar, is behind the collecting. Al-Thani heads the Qatar Museum Authority, which has led the charge for revitalizing cultural institutions in the country.
Projects include the new Jean Nouvel-designed Qatar National Museum, due to open in 2014. Nouvel’s futuristic building will be the cherry on top of Qatar’s museum portfolio, following the 2010 inauguration of Doha’s Arab Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Islamic Art which opened in 2006.
Among the paintings in Qatar’s collection include Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), 1950, bought in 2007 for $72.8 million. Qatar also purchased Damien Hirst’s Lullaby Spring, 2002, for £9.2 million ($14.5 million) at auction in London in 2007.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Qatar holds the world’s third largest natural gas reserves and is the world’s largest liquefied natural gas exporter.
What that translates to is a GDP per capita of $102,700 – the second highest in the world – and pockets deep enough for a $250 million purchase.
