1. Andy Warhol
Warhol was a draftsman, filmmaker, and printmaker, as well as an artist. This is why his work is often so difficult to define, despite the popular collective term “pop art”.
Warhol is quoted as saying: “How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you’ve given up something.”
It was possibly his 32-piece “Soup Cans” exhibition (depicting varieties of Campbell’s condensed soup) that signaled both his rise to fame and his unique perspective when it opened its doors in 1962. Of course, his silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor have inspired mass merchandise.
Some of the mystique of Andy Warhol’s work, and its subsequent value for selling and pawning purposes, comes from the colorful personal history of this charismatic genius. Warhol was born into a poor, Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh. Yet he went on to live a Bohemian life, the darling of New York’s High Society and intellectual circles.
Andy Warhol both manipulated and reflected popular tastes and cultural references, to create his iconic pieces that are sold and pawned for record fees. In his later years, before his tragically early death, Warhol concentrated on experimental films, but fortunately for art lovers, he had previously been prolific. This is why the permanent collection of his art in Pittsburgh is the largest museum in the US dedicated to a single artist.
There is more on the life and work of Andy Warhol in this excellent profile by Vanity Fair magazine
Many of Warhol’s art pieces and paintings are highly valuable and in demand alongside the most expensive art the world has seen. This makes them and other pieces ideal for securing loans on pop art when visiting high-end pawn shops such as New Bond Street Pawnbrokers.
The fact is that Andy Warhol’s art pieces painting do sell well, and have high value at pawn shops. His haunting image Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold in 2013 for $105.4 million and Green Car Crash (Green Car Burning I) went for $71.7 million in 2017.
2. Bernard Buffet
Born in 1928 in Paris, and educated at the National School of Fine Arts on the Left Bank of the Seine, Bernard Buffet worked in Eugène Narbonne’s studio and developed a bold, graphic style of expressionism and deft use of colour. He also took a stand against abstract art by establishing the Witness Man collective of artists.
Buffet produced more than 8,000 works before taking his own life in 1999. Despite never achieving critical acclaim during his lifetime, Bernard Buffet enjoyed enormous commercial success, which explains the increasingly high value of his art and paintings at pawn shops.
Buffet’s works remain consistently popular with collectors and pawnbrokers alike, raising huge sums at auction. The highest price tag to date was for his 1991 work Les Clown Musiciens, Le Saxophoniste, which fetched £1 million at Christie’s in London in 2016. Second place goes to La Tour Eiffel (1955), which raised £774,000 at Matsart in Israel also in 2016; followed by Scene De Rue (1956), which Sotheby’s in New York sold for £620,000 in 1990.
3. Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst is one of the most iconic British artists of the late 20th century and reportedly the country’s richest living artist, with an estimated wealth of over £200 million. His controversial and often elaborate modern art pieces have made him synonymous with the contemporary art scene in the UK, and are sold alongside some of the most expensive pieces of art in the world. Many of Hirst’s pieces have sold with a hefty price tag, but undoubtedly his most famous installation is ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’. This divisive but undeniably thought-provoking piece consists of a dead tiger shark, preserved in formaldehyde solution and presented in a clear display cabinet.
Producing the artwork cost £50,000 in itself, but it sold for an undisclosed fee (reported to be around £8 million) in 2004. His 2008 auction, ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’, was a record-breaking two-day event at Sotheby’s Auction House in London, that made £118 million over 128 items.
Many books have been written on the subject of Damien Hirst’s art. What you can say, is that the notoriety Hirst gained in the 1990s as a member of the Young British Artists gives him a unique cultural position. His controversial artworks always attract media attention and are often expensive to make – such as his Golden Calf, a marble-plinthed formaldehyde-preserved cow with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, which sold for £10.3 million in 2008.
4. David Hockney
David Hockney (OM, CH, RA) is one of the Western world’s most celebrated and iconic artists of the 20th century. A highly influential figure in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, Hockney’s seminal paintings (such as 1967’s A Bigger Splash) are instantly recognizable to art connoisseurs the world over. Of course, David Hockney’s huge reputation has also brought in some hefty price tags, placing his work alongside some of the most desirable at pawn shops. His 1972 acrylic painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) became the world’s most valuable painting by a living artist at the time, when it sold for £70 million at the prestigious Christie’s auction house, in New York, in November 2018. Hockney’s previous record sale, also in 2018, was £17.4 million for Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica (1990)…yet again a record in the world of modern art auctions.
The Yorkshire-born painter, now based in LA, is an icon of post-war contemporary art and he is reaping the benefits of the nostalgia that holds sway over much of the modern cultural zeitgeist. His transatlantic appeal, with working-class British roots but a very bright and breezy American style on his classic paintings, also helps to keep interest (and prices) high at pawn shops.
5. Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat produced a wealth of street art as well as pieces on paper and canvas during his active years. These have become highly sought after, with collectors, art enthusiasts, auction houses, and pawn shops alike having a deep appreciation for Basquiat’s African-inspired style. Between the years of 2003 and 2017, the value of 171 pieces of Jean Michel Basquiat’s work increased, with some fetching returns of up to 96.5%, making his art and paintings even more desirable at pawn shops.
Indeed, Basquiat’s work has been known to reach record-breaking prices. His painting ‘Untitled’ sold at Sotheby’s for an incredible $110,487,500 in 2017, which was the most an American artist had ever reached during an auction.
6. Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall (1887 – 1985) was a celebrated Russian-French Modernist painter, glass painter, and sculptor noted for working on a synthesis of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism. Robert Hughes called Chagall “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century,” and Chagall was inspired by Eastern European Jewish folk culture. While his work predates Surrealism, it is largely inspired by a similar dedication to the symbolic, poetic, and emotional, resisting the logic and line of the pictorial.
At a young age, Chagall moved to Paris, and then fled to the United States as a refugee during World War II. He traveled widely later in life and is known for his use of colour, expression, and the employment of a diverse range of mediums. Chagall was commissioned to create artwork for the ceiling of the Paris Opéra, murals for the Metropolitan Opera House, in New York, and a window for the United Nations building, in New York. The artist’s work was exhibited at the Musée du Louvre, Paris in 1977. He provided illustrations for Gogol’s Dead Souls and the Bible.
In November 2017, Chagall’s 10-foot-wide Le Grand Cirque (1956) sold at Sotheby’s for nearly £12 million during the longest contest of the night – 6 minutes during the auction house’s Impressionist and Modern art sale. In the same sale, Chagall’s Les Amoureux (1928) was the evening’s top sale at £22.3 million. Both sales broke Chagall’s 30-year-old £11.6 million auction record. This record was set by Chagall’s oil painting The Anniversaire (1923) at Sotheby’s in 1990.
Chagall was a prolific artist and lived to be nearly 100 years old, with most of the material on the market from his later years. As of 2017, his most inexpensive work to go on sale (according to the Artnet Price Database) was the lithograph La piège (1962) for £2,900 in 2000.
The market for Chagall art and paintings has been described by art expert Simon Shaw as “very broad and deep”. Pablo Picasso said in the 1950s that “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.”
7. Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy’s artworks are celebrated for their vibrant colours and stunning decorative style. His outdoor watercolors, in particular, have an expressive painterly quality and display a sweep of rich patterns that also transfer well to textiles and ceramics. His paintings are valuable, beautiful things to own.
Dufy was prolific, and that can affect the quantity of his art floating on the market, sometimes pushing prices down. His prints are especially volatile in value and much depends on the quality of the print itself and the quantities involved in any limited edition run. Raoul Dufy prints have gone for as little as a couple of hundred pounds, but paintings hold their value much better at pawn shops.
His L’Église de Taormina went on sale in a London gallery for £40,000. In 2017, his 1936 oil on canvas Régates à Deauville sold for $200,000, which is nearly £160,000. His most expensive artwork sold at auction is his 1907 painting La foire aux oignons, which sold for US$7,941.112 – well over £6,000,000. In 1947 Dufy said, “I have found the essence of my painting in the journey and in the search … ” Perhaps that is a life sentiment we can all relate to.
8. Robert Rauschenberg
The artist was one of the forefathers of what came to be known as pop art, and his name is highly desirable at pawn shops. While names such as Warhol and Lichtenstein would go on to be synonymous with the movement, without the groundwork laid out by Rauschenberg, none of it would likely have been possible.
9. Salvador Dali
Born in Figueres, Spain, Dali was destined for the life of an artist. He enjoyed his first drawing lessons at just 10 years of age, and became a student at the Madrid School of Fine Arts as a teenager. Trips to Paris and viewings of the work of Pablo Picasso influenced his unique style, which often incorporated his own childhood memories.
Dali was a highly skilled draftsman by trade but developed an incredible flair for seeing the world from a unique perspective. His vision had its roots in renaissance art, though much of his artwork has a dreamlike quality to it. The essence of the surrealism movement in art and literature was to reject rational thinking and embrace unconscious thoughts and the full scope of the human imagination. As a result, symbolism was rife in Dali’s art, including recurrent motifs such as melting clocks and elephants with brittle legs.
Wikipedia is a great reference source for more information on this enigmatic and larger than life artist and the unmissable Dali Museum in St Petersburg FL also provides fascinating information and insights.
Many of his most outstanding works are known not just to art lovers and pawn shops, but also to the general public, including the timelessly fascinating “The Persistence of Memory” (1931), “Galatea of the Spheres” (1952), and “Swans Reflecting Elephants” (1937). Alongside his paintings, Dali became known for his film, sculpture and photography as well as his creative collaborations with other gifted individuals of the era such as fashion icon Elsa Schiaparelli.
Dali’s work is much sought after and highly valued at pawn shops. In 2011, his masterpiece “Portrait De Paul Eluard, 1929” sold for over $21.7 million at Sotheby’s, which at the time was a record breaking amount.
His art objects are equally in demand at pawn shops and command record loan prices. Salvador Dalí’s ‘lobster telephone’ was sold to the National Galleries of Scotland for £853,000 (approximately $1,000,000), when it went up for auction in the UK in 2018.
10. Sean Scully
Scully’s impressive sense of colour and composition often translate into powerful, emotive oil paintings boasting broad brushed boxes and stripes. But, not all of Scully’s paintings hang in public spaces. Private owners and dealers sometimes decide they want to release the capital from their paintings, like Sean Scully’s artworks, by pawning them.
Born in 1945, Irish-American Scully has gained international fame, with work held in galleries and collections worldwide, including London’s Tate Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, plus many more. Scully’s paintings offer echoes of Rothko but are without the heavier hues that Rothko can bring to the canvas. When you look at Scully’s work you feel reassured, level, and absorbed by new and lyrical landscapes. Scully’s work is much sought after at auctions and pawn shops because of this, and because it seems to transform itself to match any number of different settings wherever it hangs.
The first question that clients ask us is ‘How much can I borrow against my Sean Scully art or paintings ?’ In order to answer that we need to first consider that his ‘Wall of Light’ and ‘Landline’ series have elevated him to become one of the most important artists of the 21st century and a natural successor to the abstract expressionists. Values range enormously.
For instance, a limited edition (x25) hard-ground etching and aquatint in colours on paper entitled Narcissus sold for £2,250 in June 2018. Five months later in November 2018, his painting Landline Red Veined sold for $1,515,000 (approximately £1,178,000) in November 2018. That significantly outpriced the work Grey Red, which had sold for £665,000 in October 2016.
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper in 2015, Sean Scully said “I’ve always wanted my art to be global rather than local. I want to make paintings that people everywhere can relate to.” It is precisely that relevance that makes Sean Scully’s paintings and prints so collectible and desirable at pawn shops.
11. Tom Wesselmann
“The challenge for an artist is always to find your way of doing something,” Wesselmann said. That statement carries echoes of truth for all of us. Life isn’t always predictable. Typically, your Wesselmann artwork might be a screen print, sculpture, or collage stylizing the female figure or some aspect of it: a bold depiction of a cigarette between pouting red lips, or a single shoe in vibrant colours. One of New York’s most famous artists associated with the pop art movement, Wesselman was inspired by contemporary and media culture and other aspects of Americana. His very large-scale paintings hang like billboards in galleries around the world, including the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Along with Lichtenstein and Warhol, Wesselmann is one of the most famous artists to arise from the New York Pop Art scene. His work is incredibly varied and rivals some of the most valuable paintings in the world. His 1960s series Great American Nude features flat paintings in patriotic red, white, and blue. His collages went on to reflect advertising and everyday objects. Then, in the 1980s he began to create wonderful three-dimensional artworks using canvas and cut metal.
Tom Wesselmann said:
“I find sometimes I get so excited working, especially when starting new ideas; I get so excited that I get uncomfortable. It almost feels dangerous, like I’m flirting with something dangerous.”
Perhaps that is what makes his work so contemporary and valuable at auction houses and pawn shops, so real that it almost dances off the wall. His prints and works on paper currently sell for anything from several hundred to many thousands of pounds. His most expensive artwork ever sold at auction remains his 1963 Great American nude no. 48. It fetched $10,681,000 or roughly £8,300,000. If you want to release the capital from your Wesselmann painting while safeguarding your privacy, then New Bond Street Pawnbrokers are here to help you do just that.
12. Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin (CBE) is one of the most ground-breaking, controversial, and exciting artists of the modern British era. Emin produces artworks in multiple mediums including her signature neon tubing, but also applique, sculpture, painting, photography, and drawing. Cutting her artistic teeth in the legendary Young British Artists clique in the 1980s, alongside such luminaries as Damien Hirst, her early work was often supported by iconic advertising mogul Charles Saatchi.
The piece that catapulted Emin into public consciousness was her Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a mass-produced tent appliqued inside with the names of everyone Emin had ever slept with up until that point. Many misconstrued the exhibit’s title as a euphemism for sexual activity, when in fact she used the term slept in a more literal sense. It was rumored to have sold for around £300,000 before it was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004.
Emin’s most famous piece is undoubtedly My Bed. This controversial installation consisted of her own unmade bed, in which she had slept and had sexual intercourse over several days of depressed drinking. Features included bloody underwear, condom wrappers, and cigarette ends. Somewhat predictably, it caused a media storm upon its first showing in 1998. Its value was confirmed at £2.5 million when it was sold in 2014.
Well, all publicity is good publicity goes the common idiom – and this is certainly true for Tracey Emin. The sexually charged nature of her works, and her actions during media appearances, certainly awarded her enviable column inches in the newspapers during the 1990s. However, there is something intensely honest about her most famous pieces that go beyond the tabloid furor and resonate with many people.
13. Van Gogh
Born in 1853 in the Netherlands, the life of Van Gogh is often considered tragic. Now considered one of the most prestigious and sought-after artists of all time at auctions and pawn shops alike, Van Gogh struggled as an artist and reportedly only sold one painting during his life. Van Gogh struggled with his mental health and towards the end of his life stayed in multiple psychiatric facilities. Contemporary art critics now view Van Gogh as one of the key artists who led the post-impressionism movement. As impressionism grew in popularity, so did Van Gogh’s work.
Throughout the course of his life, Vincent van Gogh produced over 2,000 paintings. From landscapes to portraits, Van Gogh’s artwork varies in subject and medium, though he often favored oil paint. Recurring features of Van Gogh’s work include vivid colors and elaborate brush strokes that become more prominent in his work towards the end of his life.
Due to the high demand to own a Van Gogh’s artwork and paintings from collectors and galleries alike, Van Gogh artworks of any size and subject are usually incredibly valuable at pawn shops. For example, a charcoal and graphite Van Gogh drawing, named ‘Orphan Man with Cap’ sold for around $700,000 at auction in 2018. Larger works by Van Gogh are typically seen as more valuable, such as the oil painting ‘Fishing Net Menders in the Dunes’, which sold for over $8 million at another 2018 auction in Paris.
14. Banksy
15. Roy Lichtenstein
