John Baldessari Value: Top Prices Paid at Auction

Quality Material (1967-68) achieved Baldessari's current auction record when it sold at Christie's New York in May 2007 for almost double its estimate. This pivotal and iconic work, first exhibited at London's Hayward Gallery in 1969, exemplifies Baldessari's early conceptual practice and his radical departure from traditional painting. The piece demonstrates his characteristic use of found text rendered in a commercial style that removes any evidence of the hand of the artist - a technique that would become foundational to his practice. Created during a period when Baldessari maintained an almost suspicious attitude towards the nature of art itself and the functioning of the art market, Quality Material represents this skepticism in perhaps its most stringent form. Like other works from this period, including Tips For Artists Who Want To Sell (1966-68) and I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971), it pokes fun at the creation and sale of art.

Commissioned Painting: A Painting By Edgar Transue (1969) secured this impressive result at Sotheby's New York in May 2014, as part of the prestigious Sender Collection sale titled "Ahead of the Curve." Ironically, considering the work’s status in Baldessari’s portfolio, the piece was not created by Baldessari. It belongs to his seminal Commissioned Paintings series, where he hired sign painters, including Edgar Transue, to create photorealistic paintings of photographs he had taken of his friend George Nicolaidis pointing at everyday objects. The idea came from a very literal reading of Al Held’s criticism that “all Conceptual Art is just pointing at things.” By adding each sign painter's name to the canvas, Baldessari cleverly subverted traditional notions of artistic authorship while questioning the nature of artistic labour, high- vs. low-art, and value.

Selling at Christie's New York in May 2009, Painting For Kubler (1966-68) represents another significant example from Baldessari's foundational text painting period. The work references art historian George Kubler's influential book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), including key ideas from the text as a frame for Baldessari’s own sharp commentary on art. Like Quality Material (1966-68), this piece showcases Baldessari’s early experimentation with transferring found text onto canvas using a commercial painting style, a technique that would go on to influence generations of artists working with text and appropriation.

Duck Pond Bar, National City, California (1966/68) achieved this result at Sotheby's New York in December 2020, shortly after the artist's death. The work comes from Baldessari's National City series, where he documented seemingly mundane locations in his hometown with a deliberately amateurish photographic style. This piece particularly exemplifies his interest in challenging traditional artistic hierarchies by elevating everyday scenes to the status of fine art. It functions similarly to how his other works gave sign writers entry to the fine art world and transformed commercial text into complex mental imagery. It is this theme of elevating the everyday into high art that dominates this list of Baldessari’s most popular and valuable works.

Source (1987) sold at Sotheby's New York in November 2023, marking a significant achievement for Baldessari's 1980s work. This piece exemplifies his mature style, combining appropriated photographs with his signature use of coloured dots to obscure faces - a technique he adopted to force viewers to focus on gesture and composition rather than individual identity. In this piece, blank-faced art collectors and auctioneers exchange equally blank artwork - a thinly veiled statement on the art world. The work's success at auction reflects the enduring market interest in pieces from the 1980s, when Baldessari had fully developed his distinctive, recurring visual themes.

Kiss/Panic (1984) achieved this result at Sotheby's New York in May 2007, holding the Baldessari record for just one day before Quality Material (1967-68) surpassed it by more than £1M. The piece is a prime example of the artist’s ability to combine found images to create new narratives. Kiss/Panic centres upon the extreme contrast between the emotions of love and violence or rage, but also their similarities. As well as establishing a new, unexpected meaning, the work questions the methods through which we construct meaning from images to begin with.

Horizontal Men (With One Luxuriating) (1984) secured this result at Christie's New York in May 2015. This montage of six gelatin silver prints exemplifies both Baldessari's cinematic use of provocative imagery and his exploration of body language and gesture. These figures, which are otherwise perfect examples of masculinity, power, and patriarchy, are powerless against their reorientation in Baldessari’s hands. They form part of a broader series examining horizontal figures resituated in visual puzzles of found photographs. Works like these, which demonstrate Baldessari’s characteristic manipulation of imagery, both physically and contextually, continue to be among the artist’s most popular.

Selling at Phillips de Pury & Company New York in May 2007, Hands, Horses (To Agree) (1987) is another example of Baldessari’s restructuring of meaning through juxtaposition and obscurity. The work combines disparate images - human hands and horses - creating unexpected visual relationships, and drawing parallels and contrasts between human and animal interactions. While faceless businessmen put their hands together to seal a deal, horses are wrangled in stills from the 1961 film The Misfits. The piece evokes questions about success, ideals, and the nature of ‘working together.’

Font (1987) achieved this result at Christie's New York in November 2006. At nearly 2 metres tall, this gelatin silver print exemplifies Baldessari’s interest in distorting the expected scale of images and things. Like Source (1987), this piece plays with the notion of art, creation, and the art market itself, with the featured artworks and faces obscured by block colour dots and squares. Without these key details, Baldessari removes his appropriated imagery from its context, allowing it to take on a more universal meaning. Works such as this were crucial in the further development of the established Pictures Generation movement, which explored media culture through appropriated imagery.

The only UK sale to feature on this list, Upward Fall (1986) sold at Phillips London in October 2018 and rounds out Baldessari’s top 10 auction results with another strong example from the 1980s. The piece showcases Baldessari's masterful manipulation of found imagery to create visual paradoxes, as suggested by its contradictory title and unique arrangement of images. Its figures and subjects are flipped, tilted, and reorientated to call into question the reality of what they are depicting - determining what is happening in each photograph is deliberately made difficult. Its sale in 2018 following a stay in a private collection and brief exhibition at MoMA, New York, in 2011, proved the growing popularity of Baldessari’s work outside the US.