Banksy artwork sells for almost $10 million at auction

Banksy playful take on a famous Impressionist painting has sold at auction for 7.6 million pounds ($9.8 million).

The second-highest price ever paid for a work by the British street artist.

“Show Me the Monet” sold to an unidentified bidder at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday evening; surpassing its upper pre-sale estimate of 5 million pounds.

In the 2005 work; Banksy added abandoned shopping carts and an orange traffic cone; to Claude Monet’s image of water lilies in his garden at Giverny.

Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s European head of contemporary art; said the work was one of the “strongest and most iconic” Banksy works to appear at auction.

Banksy, whose real name has never been officially confirmed, began his career spray-painting buildings in Bristol, England; and has become one of the world’s best-known artists.

Another Banksy work, “Devolved Parliament,” sold last year at Sotheby’s in London for 9.9 million pounds.

Earlier this month, his graffiti-style piece “Forgive Us Our Trespassing” sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.

Story behind Banksy

The Barton Hill district of Bristol in the 1980s was a scary part of town.

Very white; probably no more than three black families had somehow ended up there—working-class, run-down and unwelcoming to strangers.

So when Banksy, who came from a much leafier part of town, decided to go make his first foray there, he was nervous.

“My dad was badly beaten up there as a kid,” Banksy told fellow graffiti artist and author Felix Braun.

He was trying out names at the time, sometimes signing himself Robin Banx, although this soon evolved into Banksy.

The shortened moniker may have demonstrated less of the gangsters’ “robbing banks” cachet, but it was more memorable—and easier to write on a wall.

Around this time, he also settled on his distinctive stencil approach to graffiti.

When he was 18, Banksy once wrote, he was painting a train with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up and everyone ran.

“The rest of my mates made it to the car,” Banksy recalled;

“and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there listening to the cops on the tracks, I realized I had to cut my painting time in half or give it up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stenciled plate on the bottom of the fuel tank when I realized I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high.”

But he also told his friend, author Tristan Manco:

“As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.”