This week’s London sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s (with Phillips providing a useful counterpoint) didn’t feel like a return to exuberance so much as a return to discrimination. The rooms were busy, bidding could be emphatic, and the headline totals were strong but the underlying message was more nuanced: buyers are prepared to compete when a work is demonstrably “the one”, and equally prepared to let things go when the dimensions, the freshness, or the pricing isn’t quite right. Sotheby’s opened with a £131m Modern & Contemporary evening sale (including premium) and a 100% sell-through rate, signalling confidence when the material is right. Christie’s followed with a three-sale epic last evening totalling £197.4m (including premium), up over 50% year-on-year, underpinned by very high sell-through by both lot and value.
If there is one theme I’d take into client conversations next week, it’s that “Modern is strong” or “Surrealism is hot” is too blunt to be useful. What played out across the week was closer to a quality overview conducted in public: rarity, condition, provenance, and narrative clarity were consistently rewarded; anything that felt second-rate fared badly. The times when dealers would sweep up the middling dross has disappeared. Christie’s explicitly framed the evening as a market “pursuing quality” and favouring works “fresh to market” and the saleroom behaviour backed that up, particularly where bidding lengthened for sensational objects rather than merely “good examples.” Sotheby’s similarly benefited from a tightly curated offering and a buoyant room, but the standout moments were concentrated around the works that carried the strongest combination of scarcity and conviction i.e. works from the Lewis Collection. In a selective environment, the biggest risk isn’t missing a trend; it’s overpaying for something merely adjacent to the best.
Sotheby’s £131m total (including premium) made a point about London’s capacity to perform when it has the right consignments. The headline Bacon Self-Portrait (1972) selling for £16m (all in) illustrated that blue-chip demand remains intact when the work is tip top. But the more instructive signal, for me, was Leon Kossoff: his Children’s Swimming Pool leapt to £5.2m, dramatically above estimate and into record territory, suggesting that markets which have been comparatively underdeveloped can still “reset” when a truly compelling work appears. These repricing moments are rarely random. They tend to occur when a strong work intersects with thin supply, institutional validation, and collector readiness. Recognising which artists have that structure, and which don’t, is often more valuable than chasing whatever is fashionable and shouting loudest.
Christie’s triple-header produced the week’s biggest total, and their results underscored a market that pays up for works that feel both rare and narratively complete. The anchor was Henry Moore’s King and Queen (1952–53) at £26.3m (all in), a new auction record and the top price of the London week, importantly the last cast in private hands, which is exactly the kind of scarcity that still pulls multiple bidders into a sustained contest (even though the head was sawn off by vandals and replaced in 1994!). The evening also delivered strength for works by leading women artists in different segments: Sonia Delaunay, Paula Rego, and Rose Wylie among them reinforcing the breadth of demand when the object is right and the context is clear.
The week’s most telling market trend moment wasn’t simply that women artists performed well it was the way the market repriced one in real time. Dorothea Tanning’s Children’s Games (1942) set a new auction record at Christie’s of £4.69m and materially above her previous benchmark. This is not the language of a minor correction; it’s evidence of a maturing collector base for historically under-allocated artists particularly in Surrealism where scholarship, exhibition visibility, and cross-collecting demand are now pulling in the same direction. It’s tempting for buyers to treat “female Surrealists” as a single thesis. The real work is in differentiating quality within the category: early vs late, iconic vs peripheral imagery, rarity of comparable works, and how often the market actually sees paintings of this calibre. Those distinctions determine whether a record becomes a new plateau or a one-off spike.
Phillips’ evening total reported at £12.8m (with fees) across 23 lots was modest compared with the other houses, but it still produced a telling price or two from Alechinsky’s £258,000 work from 1960 to the fabulous first forays into the Loeb collection and its stunning array of Hammershoi paintings. Phillip’s often surfaces works that sit just outside the most obvious collecting lanes. For clients, that can mean opportunity but only if we do the homework: comparables, condition, and whether the work meaningfully advances a collection rather than merely filling a slot.
If I had to summarise the week in one sentence, it would be this: the market is functioning more like a connoisseur’s market again: less forgiving, more evidence-led, and increasingly anchored by scarcity and story. The headline numbers at Sotheby’s and Christie’s were strong, but the more useful lesson was how those numbers were achieved: concentrated competition for singular works, and a cool head elsewhere. That’s an environment where advisory adds tangible value: helping you avoid the expensive near-misses, recognising when a record is supported by fundamentals, and identifying the works that can still command real conviction even when war in the Middle East turns heads elsewhere. Please, as I always write, do use an advisor when buying major works of art. There are so many dangerous pitfalls out there!
Ill.: Couldn’t resist a photo with this little Erwin Wurm ‘Convertible Fat Car’ at Christie’s