Welcome to the Wall Power Inner Circle. I’m Marion Maneker. If you’re new here, the Wednesday issue is always devoted to the nitty-gritty of the art market. You don’t have to be an art professional to subscribe (or upgrade) to the Inner Circle, but you’re going to find actionable content here that may turn you into one. Tonight, I’m sharing my breakdown of the May auction catalogues. We’re starting from a slightly lower place than last year, but sellers’ expectations have also been lowered to a point where the market looks reasonably attractive. Let’s get started…

Lily Mortimer to Zwirner: David Zwirner Gallery announced this morning that Lily Mortimer will join the company as a director working with the sales team and artists, located at the gallery’s new 19th Street location, which opens next week. Mortimer is well liked from her decade-plus working at Gagosian and her subsequent pursuit of independent projects. It’s no secret that galleries are looking to cultivate a new generation of art buyers, and Mortimer seems well positioned to do just that. According to Zwirner himself in the firm’s press release, Mortimer “excels at one of the most important tasks for us gallerists moving forward: the ability to engage and excite a younger generation of visual arts enthusiasts and help them develop a passion for collecting and patronage.”

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The bull case for May: Given the context of falling equity and bond markets, confusion over tariffs, and geopolitical dysfunction of the highest order, a number of my Puck colleagues have been rightly nonplussed to hear me suggest there’s a bull case for the art market this May. I would not blame them if they secretly began to question my common sense, let alone my acumen in observing the art market.But art is meant to be a non-correlated asset—it has the potential to go up when other assets are falling in value, and vice versa. Just last year, in fact, the equity markets soared as the art market continued to contract. The logic here is pretty straightforward: When financial assets offer strong returns, their markets attract investors’ money. It stands to reason that art buyers, seeing strong financial returns in the markets, would forgo art purchases in favor of increasing their net worth. When those market opportunities dissipate, however, the money can flow elsewhere. David Schrader, Sotheby’s head of private sales, outlined the logic succinctly in a recent email that was broadly distributed. (Many of you sent it to me, as well.) “When they’re concerned about inflation, dollar weakness, or equity market fluctuations, some of our most sophisticated clients seek out blue chip paintings,” Schrader wrote. “Many have found artwork to be a more resilient store of value and less volatile than traditional assets.” This is a classic flight-to-quality move. Works from well-established artists are sometimes compared to the trade in gold, which has been on a real tear lately. If you’re the type of buyer who is greedy when others are fearful (and fearful when others are greedy, as the saying goes), you might view art as both currently undervalued and potentially better suited to maintain or increase its value in inflationary times. But this is only the broad theme: It doesn’t apply to all art and artists. After all, so much of the art market depends on the quality of the works on offer. There is a turn toward more historical work this season, and we’re seeing more lower-priced works from historically significant names, too. Ideally, the results this season will bring more of that type of property to market. But there’s no telling what will happen. We’re all just one tweet away from chaos. Schrader covered his bases there, too. “Other clients come to us looking for liquidity,” he wrote, before reminding his readers that “there’s no better place to turn when you’re looking to sell.”
Drexler and Magritte market clues: There are two very different upcoming lots that merit attention: Lynne Drexler’s Herbert’s Garden at Sotheby’s, and the René Magritte L’empire des lumières, from the Riggio collection at Christie’s. Both paintings were purchased at auction in the past two or three years. The Farnsworth Museum in Maine sold Drexler’s work in May 2022, two decades after the artist’s estate donated it to the museum, in order to fund acquisitions. That sale’s timing was nearly perfect: That March, a slightly later work had made more than $1 million at auction, an extraordinary price for the artist. Then this example sold for $1.5 million.Drexler’s auction market peaked the next year with almost $14 million in sales. But prices near the $1.5 million mark have been achieved as recently as last November, when a new record was set at $1.56 million. If Herbert’s Garden were to sell privately, the fees would be lower, but it isn’t clear that there’s enough buying pressure on the private market to make the consignor whole. As it is, the work will have to hammer 50 percent above its $1 million estimate to get the seller back his or her money. On the other side of the ledger is Len and Louise Riggio’s example of Magritte’s most famous image, for which the couple paid $35 million less than two years ago. That same work had been purchased in 2017 for $20 million. Can the value keep going up? Well, since the Riggios paid up for the small work, a much larger version sold for $121 million—and, more to the point, a small gouache work on paper sold for $18.8 million. Now the $35 million that the Riggios paid looks like a comparatively good value. Is there someone out there who needs to own one of these Magrittes so badly that they don’t mind paying extra for the privilege? The answer will tell us a lot about the next phase of the art market.

Now, let’s get to the main event…

May Day

Tensions are building in the art market over tariffs and other uncertainties, right in time for the May auction sales. Will they set off a flight to quality—or a retreat from unnecessary expense?

Marion Maneker

I don’t have to tell you that the art market has been in a torpor for more than two years. Tension is building within the industry, especially as Trump’s tariff tirades have spooked just about everyone into inaction. Will art be viewed as a safe haven, or an unnecessary expense? We just don’t know. Given that context, I looked through the numbers that ARTDAI provided after uploading all of this season’s presale catalogue data. The aggregate presale estimate for Phillips, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s is $1.16 billion from 1,512 lots. By comparison, last May, those three houses had 1,693 lots with a total presale aggregate estimate of $1.23 billion. That’s about 6.5 percent lower estimated value and nearly 11 percent fewer lots on offer.

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Of course, given the long slide in the auction market and the recent reversal in sentiment around the global economy, these are cautious numbers. Fewer lots have been offered, and there has been near universal pressure to reduce estimates. But the average estimate value is still up almost 5 percent, from $728,000 to $764,000. That may be an indication of the “flight to quality” we’ve been expecting in the art market. We’ll get another indication when the results come in, and we see the proportion of the sales accounted for in the top 10 lots. Right now, those lots have a combined estimate of $315 million, or 27 percent of the overall estimated value. Post sales, we’ll be looking to see whether that number moves well above 30 percent and closer to even 40 percent—which would signal a flight to quality, especially since the lower estimate ranges have been the most active in terms of bidding over the past two years or so. One side note before we get into the data on which artists are featured most in these sales. According to ARTDAI’s numbers, the market share gap between Christie’s and Sotheby’s that we saw earlier in the year is rapidly closing. In previous auction cycles so far in 2025, the value of art sold at Christie’s has been as high as twice that of Sotheby’s. This is, presumably, an effect of the changing fee structure and some consignor wariness about Sotheby’s since its restructuring at the end of the year. Of the $1.16 billion in estimated value on offer at the three houses, a little more than $600 million is at Christie’s; $484 million is at Sotheby’s; and Phillips has about $70 million. In terms of presale share, Christie’s has 52 percent of the market, Sotheby’s nearly 42 percent, and Phillips a little over 6 percent. The duopoly, as many predicted, has begun to balance itself.

May’s Top 10 Artists

The selection of artists and the market share of the estimates is interesting. Alberto Giacometti is by far the most valuable artist on offer presale, with nearly $155 million, or 10 percent of the estimated value. Half of that value comes from the most expensive work on offer: a $70 million bust of his brother Diego. Of the 10 other Giacometti works being offered, four come from the Riggio collection. The average estimate for a Giacometti is $10 million. Pablo Picasso reclaims his place right behind Giacometti with nearly $66 million spread across a whopping 38 works—albeit at an average estimate of only $1.7 million. Only two of these are major Picassos: The Riggios have a $20 million painting of Lee Miller, and Sotheby’s has a late work of a seated musketeer once owned by the artist’s sister. Meanwhile, the René Magritte market has slowed a little, with only $60 million worth of estimated value in seven works on offer. Half of that value lies in the L’empire des lumières work that the Riggios bought around two years ago. Another quarter of the value is the Riggios’ other Magritte, and a third painting at Sotheby’s, with an estimate of $10 million.

There are 29 Andy Warhol works on offer in May, but half of the value lies in the Big Electric Chair that Christie’s is selling. The nearly $58 million in estimated value accounts for about 5 percent of the total value of the May sales. But the average price of a Warhol on offer is just about $2 million. Then there’s one Piet Mondrian painting that accounts for just above 4 percent of the sales’ total estimated value, while four paintings by Mark Rothko account for a similar 4 percent proportion with a total estimated value of $47 million; another four paintings by Claude Monet account for $42 million in presale estimate. Jean-Michel Basquiat has just under $40 million in estimated value spread over 10 lots. The top lot is a work that was offered privately several years ago at a price of $35 million, but this time around it’s estimated at $20 million. There’s also a work on paper from 1981 that carries a $10 million estimate. Roy Lichtenstein’s estate accounts for 45 works by the artist at auction this season. Three more works are on offer at Christie’s, for a total of 48 lots with a combined estimated value of just under $37 million. With a major retrospective next year at the Whitney and the expected turn toward works by artists with historical pedigrees, these lots will be an interesting market gauge. Finally, the 29 lots from Alexander Calder are not significantly more than usual, considering the artist’s huge body of work. They have a combined estimated value of nearly $37 million, too.

The Best of the Rest

Some of the artists outside the top 10, but with a great deal of work on offer, are Richard Prince with 19 lots; Henri Matisse and Ed Ruscha with 18 lots each; Henry Moore and Keith Haring with 16 lots each; Joan Mitchell with 15 lots; Marc Chagall with 14 lots; Joan Miró and George Condo, each with 11 lots, and Willem de Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly, and Auguste Rodin with 10 apiece. Also, some noteworthy total estimated values by still more artists: Frank Stella with more than $20 million, Barbara Hepworth with $8.7 million, Remedios Varo with $6.5 million, Lisa Brice with $2 million, and Barbara Kruger with $1.7 million.

That’s it for today. More on Friday. M

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