At auction
What the 1973 auction price for Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles Number 11 1952?
Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock Number 11, 1952 (painting) No. 5, 1948 Earth's Creation L'Homme qui marche I
Jackson_Pollock-At_auction Number_11,_1952_(painting)-Abstract No._5,_1948-Abstract Earth's_Creation-Artist_and_painting L'Homme_qui_marche_I-Auction
Art market. At auction. In 1973, Blue Poles "(Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952)," was purchased by the Australian Whitlam Government for the National Gallery of Australia for US $2 million (A$1.3 million at the time of payment). At the time, this was the highest price ever paid for a modern painting. The painting is now one of the most popular exhibits in the gallery. It was a centerpiece of the Museum of Modern Art's 1998 retrospective in New York, the first time the painting had been shown in America since its purchase. In November 2006, Pollock's "No. 5, 1948" became the world's most expensive painting, when it was sold privately to an undisclosed buyer for the sum of $140,000,000. Another artist record was established in 2004, when "No. 12" (1949), a medium-sized drip painting that had been shown in the United States Pavilion at the 1950 Venice Biennale, fetched $11.7 million at Christie's, New York. In 2012, "Number 28, 1951," one of the artist’s combinations of drip and brushwork in shades of silvery gray with red, yellow and shots of blue and white, also sold at Christie's, New York, for $20.5 million—$23 million with fees—within its estimated range of $20 million to $30 million. In 2013 Pollock's "Number 19" (1948) was sold by Christies for a reported $58,363,750 during an auction that ultimately reached $495 million total sales in one night which Christies reports as a record to date as the most expensive auction of contemporary art.
Number 11, 1952, also known as Blue Poles, is an abstract expressionist painting and one of the most famous works by American artist Jackson Pollock. It was purchased amid controversy by the National Gallery of Australia in 1973 and today remains one of the gallery's major paintings. 
No. 5, 1948 is a painting by Jackson Pollock, an American painter known for his contributions to the abstract expressionist movement. The painting was done on an 8' × 4' sheet of fiberboard, with thick amounts of brown and yellow paint drizzled on top of it, forming a nest-like appearance. It was originally owned by Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr. and displayed at the Museum of Modern Art before being sold to David Geffen and then allegedly to David Martinez in 2006 (though the supposed sale of this painting to Martinez has been denied by his attorneys). According to a report in "The New York Times" on November 2, 2006, the painting was sold by David Geffen, founder of Geffen Records and co-founder of DreamWorks SKG, to David Martinez, managing partner of Fintech Advisory Ltd, in a private sale for a record inflation-adjusted price of $140 million. The sale was reportedly brokered by Sotheby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer, however, the law firm of Shearman & Sterling, LLP, issued a press release on behalf of its client, David Martinez, to announce that contrary to recent articles in the press, Martinez does not own the painting or any rights to acquire it. It is speculated that Geffen sold the painting, along with two others, to raise enough funds to bid for the "Los Angeles Times". Martinez has reportedly been amassing an art collection, buying multiple modern artworks in recent years. This sale would make the painting the second most expensive ever sold, privately or at auction, exceeding the sale of Gustav Klimt's 1907 "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" to Ronald Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder Companies fortune, by around five million dollars, trailing only the sale of "The Card Players" to the Royal Family of Qatar reportedly for between $250 to $300 million. David Cook, deputy director of painting at Sotheby's Australia, stated that the price of Pollock's paintings will continually rise in value, as very few of Pollock's paintings are still left. Cook has also stated that another of Pollock's paintings, "Blue Poles", is worth at least 180 million AUD and possibly even more than "No. 5, 1948". In addition to the refutation issued by Shearman & Sterling, the auction expert Josh Baer indicated that Martinez was not the buyer of the painting. 
Emily Kame Kngwarreye was a senior Anmatyerre woman, who only commenced painting when she was aged about 80. In the following eight years she produced an astonishing 3,000 or more paintings; an average of one painting per day. "Earth's Creation" is described as part of her "high-colourist" phase. It's dubbed a rich vibrant masterpiece of swirling blues, greens and yellows, from what Kngwarreye called the "green time", after the rains came and the bush erupted in new life. She painted with a 'dump dot' technique, also known as ‘dump dump’, using her brush to pound the acrylic paint onto the canvas and create layers of colour and movement. The painting represents, in the words of the artist, "whole lot" - Earth's Creation. Emily's paintings are described by leading international art academics as being equal to the works of Monet and great Abstract artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. Experts have argued that "Earth's Creation", painted at Utopia on the edge of the Simpson Desert in Central Australia by an Australian with no formal or informal training in art, is an even more important painting for Australia than American painter Jackson Pollock's "Blue Poles", purchased by the National Gallery of Australia in 1973. 
On 3 February 2010, edition number two of the sculpture came up for auction at Sotheby's auction house in London. The piece was sold by German banking group Commerzbank, which had acquired it when it took over the Dresdner Bank in 2009. The sale of the sculpture marked the first time in 20 years that a life-size Giacometti figure of a walking man came to auction. It had been estimated to sell for between £12 and £18 million, but in just eight minutes the sculpture was bought by Lily Safra, widow of the prominent Lebanese banker Edmond Safra for £58 million. Including the buyer's premium the price reached £65 million (US$103.7 million). The piece broke the record for a Giacometti work at auction, which was set at $27.5 million by "Grande Femme Debout II" in 2008, and that for the most expensive sculpture sold at a public auction, which was held by the 5000-year-old Guennol Lioness, sold at Sotheby's in 2007 for $57.2 m. When expressed in British pounds and when inflation is ignored, the bronze also broke the record price for an art work sold at auction which, since 2004, was held at $104.2 million (then £58.2 m) by Pablo Picasso's "Garçon à la pipe". The most expensive work of art sold at a public auction remained Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet", which was bought in May 1990 for $82.5 million (approx. $138.4 million in CPI-adjusted 2010 US dollars), while Jackson Pollock's "No. 5, 1948", which was privately sold for $140 million in 2006 (approx. $151 million in 2010 dollars), remained the most expensive work of art sold overall. 