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Welcome back to the Wall Power Inner Circle. I’m Marion
Maneker.
Last week we learned that the top of the art market hadn’t perished—it was only in hibernation. Twenty-seven works sold for prices at $20 million or above, a sector of the market that was sorely lacking in sales a year ago. Meanwhile, the appetite for much lower-priced art seems to have only grown, with the day sales bumping up against all-time high totals. Tonight, I speak to the heads of the modern and contemporary day sales at Sotheby’s to get a granular understanding
of how those markets are operating.
Up top, Christie’s announced the sale next month of 106 lots from the Zabludowicz collection, with a combined estimate of £15 million; the High Museum in Atlanta announced the winner of its Driskell Prize; and Christie’s Hong Kong jewels sale came in very strong. |
- Discounted ARTDAI subscriptions for Wall Power readers: Our friends at ARTDAI are offering Inner Circle subscribers a discount on their auction database and market intelligence platform. If you sign up
here, you’ll get the first month for $26, then pay $95 a month thereafter. I use ARTDAI. It’s the best tool available.
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Also mentioned in this newsletter: Ashkan Baghestani,
Caroline Seabolt, Edward Hopper, Roy Lichtenstein, Philip Guston, Mark Bradford, Richard Prince, Rashid Johnson, Cheryl Finley, David C. Driskell, David Wingate, Shoshanna Wingate, Georgia O’Keeffe, and more.
Let’s get started… |
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Zabludowiczes to sell 106 works at Christie’s: The 5,000-work Zabludowicz collection will be getting a little smaller this June, as the family offers 106 works with a combined estimate of £15 million in Christie’s sale in London. The sale is led by Philip Guston’s Mirror Head, from 1977, estimated at £3.5 million; Mark Bradford’s Farther South and Elsewhere, from 2016, estimated at £1 million; and
Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), from 1994, along with Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Broken Crowd, from 2021, both estimated at £800,000. It also includes works by Henry Taylor, Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Rose Wylie, Neo Rauch, Takashi Murakami,
Lubaina Himid, Yoshitomo Nara, Albert Oehlen, Per Kirkeby, Charline von Heyl, and Beatriz Milhazes.
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Driskell Prize winner announced: The High Museum in Atlanta announced that Cheryl Finley was awarded the 2026 David C. Driskell Prize honoring contributions to African American art and art history. Finley is the director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective at Spelman, where she is also the Walton Endowed professor of art and visual culture. The prize comes with a $50,000 award.
- Christie’s
$74M Hong Kong jewels sale: A jadeite bead and colored diamond necklace topped Christie’s sale of jewels in Hong Kong yesterday when someone plunked down $25.5 million for the lot. The entire sale totaled $74 million—Christie’s says that’s 55 percent higher than the same sale last year—with 90 percent of the lots sold. Asian bidders were also visible among the top lots in the New York sales last week, suggesting those buyers might become more active again.
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Now, let’s look at Sotheby’s day sales… |
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A joint interview with the heads of Sotheby’s day sales on the depth of last
week’s sales, the importance of estates in driving them, and the enduring thrill of selling another Hopper. |
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This auction season, the big news was that the top of the market had returned to health: Lots over
$20 million accounted for more than $1.26 billion of the $2.53 billion in total sales. Clearly, the performance at that band of the market colors our overall perception, and the combined total for all of the evening sales was almost $2.2 billion. Nevertheless, the day sales also showed remarkable strength across houses and categories, showing that market momentum is broad-based and not just confined to the big spenders.
With that in mind, I spoke to the two heads of Sotheby’s day
sales—Caroline Seabolt (modern) and Ashkan Baghestani (contemporary)—about their respective auctions. Together, the day sales at Sotheby’s brought in almost $172 million. That may only be a small part of the house’s nearly $909 million total this season, but it’s important for two reasons: First, day sales often generate more-reliable profit margins than the evening sales. Second, the collecting that takes place at this level helps determine which artists
develop markets strong enough to generate evening sale material.
I spoke to each separately, and a combined transcript of our conversations is below. As always, it’s been edited for clarity and length. |
Could We Be a Bit More
Aggressive?
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Marion Maneker: Let’s start with an
overview of each of your sales.
Ashkan Baghestani: The contemporary day sale made $102.5 million with fees. Then there was the David and Shoshanna Wingate sale, which had around $3 million in contemporary art. So we can say comfortably we’re around $105 million for the season, which is among our highest. For me, the two most impressive takeaways are the sell-through rate of 93 percent—and we’ve sold a few more works
post-sale, bringing that closer to 94 or 95 percent. Plus, 65-plus percent of lots sold above their presale estimate, which makes me think, are we pricing too conservatively because of the softness in the market in 2024, a very difficult year? Is this a good learning curve for next season, where we could be a bit more aggressive?
Also, I saw a lot of new bidders in our category. For some lots, there were three to four bidders. That’s a pretty big average. I’m struck by the depth of some
of these artists’ markets. We’re always wary as an auction house: How many Mitchells, Calders, Frankenthalers, Hockneys, and Richters can you include in an auction cycle? This season, we had about seven Frankenthalers from all sorts of periods, price points, and mediums. Clearly there’s a lot of depth in that market, with consistently new bidders and buyers for each of those works. |
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Caroline, what happened in your
market?
Caroline Seabolt: The modern day auction had a presale estimate of $37.4 million and achieved $62.5 million with fees added—one of our highest sale totals ever. [It’s] probably the most cross-category sale during all of the marquee sales across any auction house. We’re really committed to that. The sale is primarily made up of European impressionist and modern art, but American art, which is actually my specialty, as well as
Latin American art make significant contributions too. That creates a bit of a unique narrative.
So it’s less Europe-focused and more broadly modern, encompassing all the forms of modernism and their different expressions in different regions?
Seabolt: Exactly. American art was created as a separate collecting category in the ’70s, but American artists like Childe Hassam traveled to Paris and worked
alongside other European impressionists. So we’re bringing these artists together in conversation with each other—where they make sense. We saw that cross-category strategy at its best this season. The best example was the $4.1 million result for the Edward Hopper. We had four bidders. The average lot in our day sales had
3.1 bidders, and 27 lots in the sale had over five bidders. That was pretty great.
Some other observations: Great prices for René Magritte, great prices for Joan Miró—that was really exciting to see. We had some really strong prices for impressionism, a market where prices had been falling. We started to see those prices and artists come back, specifically in the middle market. For example, we saw amazing prices in relation to estimates for artists like
Mary Cassatt and Thomas Wilmer Dewing. |
A lot of the property in these sales came from collections. Can you give us some
insight into how you make decisions around which collections to take?
Baghestani: The bread and butter of our day sales are our estates. We had about six this season, which is impressive in number and quality, and they were all very different—different artists, names, periods, identities. The selection is an interesting process because we try to put as much as we can in a day sale. I’m all for a wide variety of price points, from $5,000
to $1 million or more, but there’s always a consideration on volume. We’re told our sales are sometimes too large for clients to absorb in one day. We average between 300 to 400 lots between two sessions, which is a lot.
In most cases, it is very important to consignors and advisors for us to take as much as possible. But in the current context of the Breuer—the most iconic building, but one where space is more limited—we need to be more careful [about] what we select. We try to select
between 20 and 40 works and make sure we don’t overpromise. We have lost collections because we didn’t want to—or couldn’t—take everything.
The great thing with estates, especially for the day sale component, is that we’re not pushed as much on estimates. Estates and advisors understand the game. Over the last three or four seasons, estates between $2 million and $6 million usually exceeded their presale estimates by far.
Seabolt: The Hopper came from an estate. You won’t
be able to find a painting like that again. They’re either all in museums or don’t have that sort of tightness of execution. The Hopper also came with a Childe Hassam work on paper that we sold for about $70,000. Those were from a very important private estate, and they had been tucked away for years and years. I think it was specifically the freshness and the quality of those pictures that drove the prices.
On the other hand, we also had great results for Georgia
O’Keeffe. We had four works by O’Keeffe in the sale, and it’s pretty rare these days to see four O’Keeffes estimated under $1 million. The O’Keeffes were more a result of the market momentum we’re seeing for her work. That is also in relation to many of the great women surrealists that we were selling—the Jane Graverol, for example, that really took off and made an amazing price. Both of the Bridget Tichenors sold well. Now is really such an amazing
time for these artists.
This season we’re fully in a return toward historic works. Ashkan, your day sale two or three years ago would have been populated with young, emerging artists whose work had been bought in the last five or 10 years.
Baghestani: We’re in a more educated market. A lot of the speculators and clients flush with liquidity during Covid years are out. We’re back to really looking at quality, importance,
and provenance. The smallest estates and collections under $10 million all have a great story. People buy into these stories because they like old collectors’ visions; they like someone’s collecting habit, and they buy into that. It’s generally part of the appreciation process. |
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That is such an important point. People are buying a story: It could be the story of the
artist, but it’s also often the story of the collectors.
Seabolt: Everyone wants to have their finger on the pulse of the next undiscovered artist, and people love to get in from the ground floor first. But really, across the sale in general, it was private collectors participating, not necessarily a lot of speculation or trade buying for resale. These are true collectors who want to buy these things, put them up on their
walls, and keep them for years and years. That was very encouraging to see. |
“This
Is Where We Make Markets”
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One final question about the use of irrevocable bids in the day sales, Ashkan.
They seem to be creeping in from the evening sales.
Baghestani: The day sale is not just an afterthought of the evening sales; it feels like a continuation in terms of quality collections and market momentum. Just this season we had the Roy Lichtenstein, which is the highest-value lot we’ve ever sold at Sotheby’s in a contemporary day sale. When I joined this team five years ago, third-party guarantees in a day sale
context were not a big thing. Now we get as many offers on day sale works as they do in the evening sales.
I see a real, equal split—between dealers and advisors who want to lock in the good, well-priced material because they have great clients who want those pieces, and more and more private clients who get excited by the guarantee process. A lot of our new clients are from the financial world, from the tech world. They’re financially savvy, so for them to bring a financial component
into their bidding activity is very exciting.
A lot of our current active guarantors on the buyer side want a guarantee to lock in their funds and focus on a lot. Those are great examples of private clients who are outbidding dealers and advisors in the guarantee process because they actually want the work. They come in more aggressively, they don’t care as much about the financials, and they really care about locking it in. I see a lot of this segment ending up as the final
winner.
When you have 350 lots, every lot, whether it’s $5,000 or $5 million, is important. We target everyone. In the day sale, we have a lot of surprises. One of the stats I love checking the day before is how many paddle registrants we have online. In this case, it was about 650 to 700, and maybe only 10 percent had placed a bid online, meaning a lot of others were waiting: They bid the moment the sale opens or were just there as viewers.
Our margins are good, there’s a lot of
volume, and the wide variety of dealmaking means we come out really strong in terms of profit. People sometimes don’t understand how hypercompetitive the day sale environment is. This is where we make markets. And I want to try to put more evening-sale-quality works in the day sale and see how the segment above $3 million evolves. |
That’s it for today. I’ll be back with more of what’s going on around town on Friday. Let’s gather
here then.
M |
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