We asked for your art-related questions—strange or straightforward—and you delivered. In this installment, we dive into art without much wiggle room. (See all installments.)

Has there ever been a paint by numbers painting that’s fetched a 6 figure total or better at auction? — Ray from New York

For those not familiar, “paint by numbers” kits contain a predetermined outline of a given work (usually a landscape), the required paint, and numbers indicating where to apply it; this is similar to “color by numbers,” as found in children’s books and magazines. It is, in essence, everything needed for a painting but the final result. (And perhaps the exact opposite of the work of Jackson Pollock.) After a bit of researching, the short answer to the question at hand is “no.” But the longer answer, as is often the case, is a bit more interesting.

Paint by numbers kits were invented in the 1950s as a collaboration between a commercial artist (Dan Robbins) and an engineer and owner of a paint company (Max S. Klein). It wasn’t long after they launched (their motto: “A BEAUTIFUL OIL PAINTING THE FIRST TIME YOU TRY”), that they sold 12 million kits. It’s not hard to imagine why. It allowed anyone to be an artist, deftly combining personalization with mass market commercialization. Coincidentally—or not coincidentally at all—the invention coincided with the Pop art movement. This was a time when the world of art was beginning to turn in on itself. Questions were being asked about where art belonged in mass culture, and what to make of the newfound ability to reproduce works at scale. If Warhol and friends were ironically subjugating the idea of a mass market, Klein and Robbins were doing so without irony—and for much profit.

Paint by numbers works have been auctioned and continue to be—albeit at much more affordable prices, on eBay. The largest sum I could find for a paint by numbers kit at auction is Painting-By-Numbers (2001) by Damien Hirst, which sold for £4,375 ($5,674), a modest sum for Hirst; he once auctioned off £111 million worth of work in a single day at Sotheby’s.

Hirst, Banksy, Duchamp, Warhol. These are the sort of artists we might have expected to tackle the form. That is: playful, ironic, conceptual. For a work to have been earnestly created from a paint by numbers kit assumes that many like it exist—a quality that ensures it won’t be worth much on the art market.

The closest thing to a six-figure paint by numbers painting that I can think of is Matisse’s cut-outs. (This work, for example, sold for $1,567,500 in 2017. Items from his “Jazz” series, which we have in our art library, sold from $8,000 to $45,000.) These works are similar to paint by numbers kits in that creative expression is spent primarily on outlines. But even this relation is flimsy at best. Matisse is Matisse; the lines he cut were, well, cut by Matisse. And that is at the heart of why paint by numbers—something meant for the masses to produce—goes against the idea of a high-value work—something only one person could.

— Andrew Lipstein, Head of Editorial

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