All three major auction houses — Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips — achieved exceptionally strong results this season. Expectations were set by the white-glove sale of the Mnuchin collection at Sotheby’s a week before the houses went head-to-head in their flagship spring auctions. Across the board, tradition appeared to triumph over innovation: Modern art staged a remarkable comeback, records tumbled, and collectors demonstrated an appetite for masterpieces of unquestionable quality with fabled provenance.
Text by Jo Vickery
Arriving at the auction houses for the previews could hardly have been more different experiences.
My first stop was Sotheby’s, where I had come to see a rare painting by the Russian avant-garde artist Varvara Stepanova. Frances Asquith reminded me that the work had last appeared at the legendary 1988 Moscow auction — a provenance regarded almost as a gold standard among collectors of Russian art.
Standing before the painting, I was immediately struck by its tactile surface. The rich impasto and flashes of pure colour — mauve, yellow and green — revealed qualities that no digital image, however sophisticated, could adequately convey. More than a decade ago, while working at Sotheby’s, I sold another Stepanova painting from a closely related series. During these years, she became fascinated by the kinetic possibilities of the human figure, depicting musicians, acrobats and athletes through an increasingly abstract visual language. Heads became circles, limbs elongated geometric forms. These works occupy a fascinating intersection between Russian theatre, dance and fine art, reducing movement itself to a dynamic arrangement of shapes and colour.
The pre-sale exhibition at Sotheby’s was blissfully quiet and unhurried. Only a handful of visitors wandered through the dark, monumental spaces of the building — one of my favourite examples of New York’s brutalist architecture. It soon became clear why: viewing that day was by invitation only.
Christie’s could not have offered a greater contrast.
As soon as we stepped through the doors, the doorman greeted us with a broad grin and a palpable sense of excitement. The atmosphere was electric and sale rooms full. Approaching the cordoned-off galleries where works from the S.I. Newhouse collection were displayed, another guard cheerfully warned us to “prepare to be inspired”.
For once, the enthusiasm was entirely justified.
It is no exaggeration to say that the experience felt more like visiting a major museum than attending a commercial pre-sale auction exhibition. There was Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A (1948), one of the artist’s earliest and most important drip paintings, a work that demanded prolonged contemplation. Turning into the next gallery, one encountered masterpiece after masterpiece. Then came Rothko’s No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) from the collection of Agnes Gund, which would go on to establish a new auction record for the artist.
What struck me most was the extraordinary red stripe, which seems almost to hover in front of the canvas rather than sit upon it. The experience brought to mind Olga Rozanova’s iconic Green Stripe of 1917. While the two works are separated by nearly half a century, both explore the emotional and spatial possibilities of a single dominant colour field. Rozanova's pioneering abstraction reminds us that many of the ideas later associated with post-war American painting had already been explored by the Russian avant-garde.
Yet the true star of the exhibition was not a painting. It was Constantin Brancusi’s Danaïde, conceived and cast around 1913. Measuring little more than 27 centimetres in height, the sculpture possesses an astonishing presence. Its refined forms and luminous surfaces encapsulate Brancusi’s lifelong pursuit of essential beauty. Selling for $107.6 million, it established a new auction record for the artist and became the second most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction.
Phillips bright white cavernous basement space also had a buzz the morning I visited. They have endured several challenging seasons, but this spring marked a significant recovery. Despite two withdrawals from its Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, the auction achieved a 100 per cent sell-through rate — another white-glove sale — and realised a respectable $115.2 million.
Among the leading lots was Claude Monet’s La Route de Vétheuil, effet de neige, which sold for $9.29 million, alongside strong results for a range of post-war masters. Particularly interesting was Phillips’ willingness to broaden its offering beyond the usual contemporary focus. The inclusion of nineteenth-century and modern Scandinavian paintings from the collection of John L. Loeb Jr. demonstrated a confidence that collectors are willing to engage with quality works outside the mainstream categories that have dominated recent years.
As I left New York and returned to Europe, what surprised me most was the strength of the Modern art market relative to contemporary art. The greatest excitement, the fiercest bidding and the strongest prices throughout the week were often reserved for Modernism and classic post-war painting. What struck me most was that these results seemed to reverse what I had increasingly come to regard as a worrying trend: the gradual loss of momentum in the market for Modern art. Whether this marks a genuine long-term change remains uncertain, but for one week in New York, Modernism punched back — and did so emphatically.
The headline figure — approximately $2.5 billion worth of art sold in a single week — undoubtedly demonstrated the resilience of the upper end of the market. Yet beneath the headlines, a more nuanced picture emerged. Collectors today are becoming increasingly selective. They want the best works, by the best artists, from the best collections.
This does not feel like a speculative bubble. Middle-market material remains challenging to sell, while exceptional works continue to attract intense competition. The result is a market increasingly divided between the extraordinary and the merely good. At the very top it remains a seller’s market; further down it is very much a buyer’s market. For discerning collectors willing to do their homework, that may present some of the most interesting opportunities of all.
