Every November the world’s leading collectors descend on Manhattan for the marquee auctions at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips and Bonhams, and this year’s sales, running from Monday 16th to Friday 20th November, promise to be among the most remarkable in recent memory.
Sotheby’s leads with ‘Legendary: The Blaquier-Arrieta Collection’, twelve Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces unseen in public for half a century and expected to realise around $450 million. Its two great treasures, Van Gogh’s ‘Châtaigniers en fleurs’ and Cézanne’s ‘Arlequin’, could each set new auction records for their artists. Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale is led by a pair of extraordinary pictures, Klimt’s luminous Attersee landscape ‘Litzlbergkeller’ and Kandinsky’s ‘Betonte Ecken’, a former Guggenheim painting now certain to set a new record for the artist. At Phillips, Modigliani’s carved limestone ‘Tête’, one of the few sculptural heads still in private hands, is the centrepiece of the evening sale, while Christie’s offers a monumental, never-before-exhibited Basquiat in ‘Untitled (Leonardo and His Five Grotesque Heads)’. Fresh-to-market masterpieces, long-held private collections and a series of potential records make this a truly exceptional week. I shall be in New York throughout the previews to view works in person on behalf of clients.