Abstract
We emphasize that color composition is an important characteristic of a painting. It impacts the auction price of a painting but it has never been considered in previous studies on art markets. By using Picasso's paintings, we demonstrate the method to analyze color compositions. In the case of Picasso's paintings sold at Chrisite's and Sotheby's auctions between 1998 and 2014 in New York, our econometric analysis shows that [controlling for all conventional painting and sale characteristics] some colors are associated with high prices. We also find that contrastive paintings (defined as works with colors that are distant from each other in the RGB color space) get high prices. We also analyse the works of Color Field Abstract Expressionists and find that, in the case of this school, the more distant the work's color composition is from the black/gray spectrum, the higher work's market price.
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