Fall Marquee Auctions Highlight an Even More Fragmented Post-Election Market

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

With the fall marquee sales in New York complete, let’s take a look at the scoresheet. This time, there were a few big winners and some surprising disappointments, even for blue-chip names. That may come down to what we might call a granular market: one dependent on the quality of the specific work that hits the block.

“The art market is not a monolith,” art adviser Megan Fox Kelly told ARTnews after the sales week. “It’s often more accurate, I think, to analyze the market at the level of the individual work.”

Works that were in demand, like Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964) and René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1954), commanded long-bidding wars and record-breaking prices ($68 million and $121 million, with fees, respectively). There were others carrying eight-figure estimates that failed to sell or were withdrawn ahead of the auction. (Looking at you, Henri Matisse, whose 1921–22 painting Torse de jeune fille never made it to the block.)

The week’s winners included Sotheby’s sales of artworks from the estate of Sydell Miller and from the collection of Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein, several Surrealist masterpieces, the Danner Memorial Window by Tiffany Studios, and Larry Warsh’s collection of drawings by Keith Haring, as well as the aforementioned Ruscha and Magritte sales at Christie’s. (There was also a notable piece of fruit, but we’ll get to that later.)

Several art advisers told ARTnews the results of this year’s fall sales highlighted several aspects of how the market currently stands, such as the unpredictability of relying on large estates and high-profile divorces to bring nine-figure works to market, as well as opportunities for discerning buyers. There was also rising interest in Surrealism and fine art design pieces, which may explain why François-Xavier Lalanne’s “Herd of Elephants in the Trees” Table (2001) sold for $11.6 million.

“It is just amazing how many people with varying taste in contemporary art, from traditional to very edgy, just love Lalanne,” adviser Laura Lester, who had worked with the Lalanne estate when she was a director at Kasmin gallery, told ARTnews.

The uneven results also reflected the nervous feeling among many buyers after the US presidential election on November 6. “I think there’s still real caution because nobody knows what’s going to happen with the world, but I still think if someone has means, they’ll pay high,” adviser Ivy Shapiro told ARTnews.

The Sydell Miller evening sale on November 19 kicked the week off on a high note, generating almost $216 million on 25 lots once owned by the beauty industry trailblazer. While the sale’s nine bidding wars set expectations high, it didn’t take long to come back to earth. The modern evening sale that followed netted only $92.9 million across 31 lots, and featured seven works that didn’t sell and two withdrawn pieces.

But sometimes, in a market like this, all it takes is one work to carry a sale. That was the case for the Christie’s double-header on November 20, when the stratospheric final price of Magritte’s L’empire des lumières helped the house net $486 million that evening. When asked if Mica Ertegun’s ownership might have helped the work achieve the record-breaking $121 million price, adviser Wendy Cromwell suggested that it was the work’s decades-long absence from the market, and the multiple offers Ertegun rejected over those years, that had more impact.

“There was always this understanding that you could never get it, that it would never be for sale until she died,” Cromwell said. “I don’t know if it was so much about the fact that she was the one that was selling it. It was more about the fact that people have been after the painting for so many years and could never convince her to sell it.”

(It should be noted that, according to the Canvas, none other than billionaire Ken Griffin was the winner of the work.)

And while interest in works by Surrealist women artists has certainly grown due to recent exhibitions around the world on the occasion of the movement’s 100th anniversary this year, the $11.4 million result at Sotheby’s for Leonora Carrington’s 1951 sculpture La Grande Dame (The Cat Woman) was driven by one ARTnews Top 200 collector’s multi-decade interest in acquiring the best examples for his institution. Eduardo Costantini, the Argentine businessman who previously placed the winning bid on Carrington’s record-smashing Les Distractions de Dagobert, plans to display both works at his Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires.

The nine works by Lichtenstein—also offered by Sotheby’s—all sold, yielding $24.36 million. The Pop artist will be the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2026, which may be one reason for these results. Only 1995’s Nude with Bust (Study) did not exceed its high estimate, but it sold for the highest amount at $4.56 million. Nude with Yellow Pillow and Roommates, both prints from 1994 and auctioned in day sales, sold for $1.2 million each, more than triple their high estimates of $350,000. Small House, a painted aluminum sculpture from 1997, was the only work with a house guarantee and irrevocable bids. It sold for $1.14 million on a high estimate of $800,000.

Marketing certainly didn’t hurt Warsh’s collection of 31 chalk-on-paper drawings by Haring—the so-called “Subway Drawings” because they were drawn onto the black matte paper that covered blank advertising in New York City subway stations. The white glove sale, which accepted cryptocurrency payments, yielded $9.2 million; all the works had guarantees and six had irrevocable bids. Adviser Candace Worth told ARTnews that the result meant they were priced correctly. A partnership with Samsung transformed one of Sotheby’s galleries into a facsimile of a New York City subway station, including wooden benches, metal railings, and videos of trains rolling by.

“It was kind of cheesy, but kind of brilliant,” Worth said.

“They didn’t even use the right subway stop,” another adviser told ARTnews. “But people loved it. I think they thought it was really cool.”

Worth said another sign of the auction market still being in a correction period was that bidding was reopened for multiple works like Jean Dubuffet’s The Ceremonious (1954) and Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Tablet (1962), the latter guaranteed by Christie’s and hammering for $2 million, half of its low estimate.

“That’s kind of amazing,” Worth said, noting the tradition of post-sale offers and negotiations for post-sale deals. “But, right there in the room? Look, they pulled out all the stops—they have to. The effort is clear. It’s not an easy market.”