The world’s most mysterious artist is raking in big bucks for his reinterpretation of a timeless painting by French painter Claude Monet.
On Wednesday, Sotheby’s sold Banksy’s Show me the Monet at an auction in London for $9.8 million after a bidding war escalated over nine minutes.
Recommended Stories
In Show me the Monet, the British street artist added street cones and shopping carts in his depiction of Monet’s Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies. Completed between 1897 and 1899, Monet’s idyllic scene shows a Japanese bridge that ran above the artist’s water garden in Giverny, Northern France.
Created in 2005, Banksy’s painting was shown alongside reimaginations of works by Vincent Van Gogh and Edward Hopper as part of the series “Crude Oils: A Gallery of Re-mixed Masterpieces, Vandalism and Vermin.”
Banksy’s identity has long been speculated but remains unknown. The artist appeared with a face covering in the 2016 biographical documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop.
Having an eye for catching the attention of the media, Banksy caught the art world by surprise in 2018 when his painting Girl With Balloon sliced into vertical rows via a built-in shredder inside the frame the moment it sold at auction.
