Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948 was sold privately by the entertainment mogul David Geffen for $140 million (£73 million), The New York Times reported yesterday.

Aficionados regard the 8ft x 4ft work as a classic early drip painting by one of the giants of 20th-century art. If the price is confirmed it would surpass the $135 million paid in June this year by the cosmetics heir Ronald S. Lauder for Gustave Klimt’s 1907 portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer I.

It would also exceed by $1 million the price at which Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas entrepreneur, had agreed to sell Le Rêve, one of his two Picassos, in August. That deal collapsed when Mr Wynn accidentally stuck his elbow through the painting when showing it off to guests. Art-world experts with knowledge of the Pollock transaction identified David Martinez, a Mexican-born financier, as the buyer, The New York Times reported.

Mr Martinez is no stranger to eye-opening acquisitions and has become a major buyer of modern art in recent years, purchasing works by de Kooning and Rothko. In 2004 he also broke the record for a residential property in New York when he paid $54.7 million for a two-storey penthouse flat overlooking Central Park. Neither Mr Martinez nor Mr Geffen was available to comment on the deal, which was said to have been brokered by Tobias Meyer, of Sotheby’s.

A spokesman for the auction house also refused to confirm the price because the Pollock had been sold privately. “In some cases it is deemed to be more beneficial to make a sale privately than at auction, to remain confidential. But if this had gone to auction it may have been bid up to an even higher price,” he said.

Pollock evolved his distinctive “drip” technique in the 1940s as he sought to find a way to express rather than merely illustrate feeling.

His “action painting” style was energetic, rhythmic and dramatic to witness. Working to a soundtrack of pounding jazz, he often applied paint directly from the tube, flicking, dripping, trailing, splashing, tracing, daubing and spattering it onto the canvas. Time magazine christened him “Jack the Dripper”.

No 5, 1948 was acquired by S.I. Newhouse Jr, the publishing magnate, who sold it to Mr Geffen, 63, who is the 50th wealthiest American, according to Forbes magazine. His fought his way up from humble beginnings as the child of working class Jewish-Ukrainian émigrés in Brooklyn to become a billionaire philanthropist.

After starting his business career at the William Morris Agency, he founded Asylum Records and later Geffen Records and steered the careers of the Eagles, Aerosmith and Guns N’ Roses among others. He formed DreamWorks SKG, the first new Hollywood studio for 60 years, with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg in 1994.

When the company’s film business was sold to Paramount for $1.6 billion in 2006, he announced that his share of the profit would go to charity.

Last month he sold other masterpieces — a de Kooning and a Jasper Johns for a total of $143.5 million, fuelling speculation that he is raising finance to buy the Los Angeles Times.

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