Works of art that made the news in 2022

1. Sold

It was the biggest art sale in history. The late Paul Allen’s collection was auctioned by Sotheby’s in November in New York. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft, owned works by Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne and Gustav Klimt, each of which sold for more than $100m (£88m), breaking individual records for those artists.

The most expensive single sale was Seurat’s 1888 Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version), a renowned work of pointillism that fetched $149.2m (£131m). Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1888-1890) sold for $138m. Total sales topped $1.5bn (£1.3bn), easily beating the record set earlier this year, for the Macklowe Collection, owned by a wealthy New York couple, which sold for $922m (£810m). The proceeds will go to charity. The sale confirmed that art is seen as a good investment in the current economic turmoil.

2. Blocked

Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Omai depicts one of Britain’s first non-white celebrities. Omai, or Mai, was a Pacific Islander who travelled with Captain Cook’s second Pacific expedition back to London in 1775. There, he gained instant fame, meeting George III and attending the opening of Parliament; he returned to the Pacific with Cook in 1776. Reynolds’s life-size painting, showing Mai in a classical pose, is a masterpiece of 18th century portraiture that marks a historic encounter between Western society and Polynesia.

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Last year, its owner, a Swiss company controlled by the Irish billionaire John Magnier, sold it, and the new buyer this year applied for an export licence to sell it abroad. The Government imposed an export ban, to give institutions time to buy it, for around £50m. By December, London’s National Portrait Gallery had successfully raised nearly £25m towards the purchase. If it manages to raise the rest, Portrait of Omai will remain in the UK and be unveiled when the gallery reopens next spring.

3. Found

In August, police found one of Brazil’s most famous paintings hidden under a bed in a beachside apartment in Rio. Sol Poente (Setting Sun), a 1929 surrealist work by Tarsila do Amaral valued at £48m, had allegedly been taken, along with 15 other paintings, in a fraud perpetrated by a gang of con artists that included the owner’s own daughter.

In January 2020, the owner of the paintings – the widow of an art collector, who was not named by police – was approached by a woman claiming to be a “clairvoyant”, with a dire warning: that her daughter, Sabine Coll Boghici, would fall ill and die if she did not act. She was persuaded to pay large sums for “spiritual treatments”. When the widow stopped paying, the gang stole £100m-worth of art – they claimed Sol Poente was “cursed” – and imprisoned her in her flat, until she finally contacted the police.

4. Saved, for the nation

One of L.S. Lowry’s most famous paintings has been bought by The Lowry arts centre in Salford, saving it from disappearing into a private collection. The Lowry paid £7.8m, including fees, for Going to the Match, painted in 1953, at auction in October. It depicts Burnden Park, the former home of Bolton Wanderers, close to Lowry’s home in Pendlebury in Lancashire.

The painting has been on display at the arts centre for 22 years, following its purchase in 1999 for £1.9m by the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), the union for players. The PFA decided this year to sell the painting. After an appeal for donations to allow the painting to stay in the public domain, the purchase was made possible by a gift from the Law Family Charitable Foundation, set up by the hedge fund manager Andrew Law and his wife Zoë. It was rehung in The Lowry in November.

Chief executive Julia Fawcett said: “It was taken off our gallery walls six months ago, it was probably the darkest day in our organisation’s history, and at that point I don’t think we could have dreamed that the painting would come back to us.”

5. Swapped

Black Truck, a painting by a Canadian folk artist that was originally swapped for a cheese sandwich, sold at auction in May for C$350,000 (£220,000). Maud Lewis (1903-1970) made a meagre living by peddling her distinctive, cheery paintings by the roadside in Nova Scotia.

Interest in her work has grown since a biopic, Maudie, came out in 2016. Irene Demas, Black Truck’s seller, was working as a chef when she acquired it in 1973 from Lewis’s friend, the artist John Kinnear, in exchange for a grilled cheese sandwich. Demas was at pains to point out “it wasn’t just an ordinary grilled cheese. It was a great sandwich, with a five-year-old cheddar and beautiful bread.”

6. Vandalised

In January, a Russian museum guard was charged with vandalism after he drew eyes on the faceless figures depicted in an avant-garde Soviet painting. The semi-abstract 1930s work by the artist Anna Leporskaya, which is insured for about £750,000, was on loan to the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre in Yekaterinburg when the “bored” 60-year-old guard made his mark with a ballpoint pen.

The damage was easily repairable, since he did not press hard enough to disturb the paint. “His motives are still unknown,” said curator Anna Reshetkina. “But the administration believes it was some kind of a lapse in sanity.”