Overall, the sales this Spring merely underlined what has been the overriding theme of the art market over the last few years: when supply is good, demand remains solid. Great works of art sold and sold well, but the mediocre struggled—far more so now than during the heights of the mid-2010s. The importance of getting advice, gathering market knowledge, and keeping a close eye on quality is becoming more and more apparent.
For Sotheby’s to gain any market traction against their behemoth competitor, Christie’s, it was vital that they listened to their clients and rebalanced the commission scales in favour of the seller. This followed their bizarre decision in early 2024 to charge vendors more and buyers less. In the art market, the seller is, has been, and always will be, king (or queen). By ostracising sellers with inflexible vendor terms, Sotheby’s shot themselves in the foot for the best part of 12 months. Despite their recent positive U-turn, it was always going to be tricky for Sotheby’s to compete. Ipso facto: they couldn’t. Christie’s boasted double the sales figures of Sotheby’s this season. Inconsistency is a bad sign for any market, and the commission error was a ‘Coca-Cola Classic’ moment that really hurt Sotheby’s ability to gain great consignments. Half of their main preview room was empty of property—an unfortunate situation.
If there was any good news on Bond Street, it was the prices paid for the high-quality artworks offered amongst the dearth of lesser works. To that end, the Max Ernst ‘Moonmad’ from the lifetime casts made a fabulous £2.1m. I was a huge admirer of this sculpture. ‘Moonmad’ is rare, but to have a Modern Art Foundry cast from the 50s is an Ernst collector’s holy grail. The price was indicative of the market’s call for quality. Another piece that exemplified this demand for quality was the Picasso, lot 9, ‘Buste d’homme’, which had been sold in South Africa in late 2024 for $420,000 but made £650,000 for the wily Sotheby’s consignor. If I were the seller in South Africa, I would be very unhappy indeed. When selling at auction, always get advice—this piece should never have gone to market in South Africa last year but should have been placed in a major saleroom with an internationally verified reputation. The cover lot of the sale was a large and impressive Yoshitomo Nara painting from his ‘Cosmic Eyes’ series—a rare piece indeed. However, at $11.5m, it perhaps didn’t command the price it might have reached during the height of the Asia-buying boom in, say, 2019. The general feel after the sale was relief rather than triumph, but I’m sure that Sotheby’s will bounce back in May. Lisa Brice’s large art history lesson painting, ‘After Embah’, made £5.5m, among a few other winners that gave the market a fillip for the rest of the week. Overall, the totals on Bond Street were solid, given the circumstances: total sales of £62.5m with a sell-through rate of 89% and only three lots withdrawn.
At Christie’s, the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale and The Art of the Surreal (aka Surrealist) Sale on 5th March achieved a combined total of £130m (making £160m including their Day Sales). The Evening Auctions saw 94% of lots sold by lot—a significant number, given that their sale was 76 lots strong. The highlights of the evening were René Magritte’s ‘La reconnaissance infinie’, which sold for £10.3m and represented the pinnacle of the artist’s 1930s work, just as Surrealism was coming into its own (founded in 1924 by André Breton). In a world where 1950s Magritte paintings fetch tens of millions, it is worth admiring a canvas like this 1933 masterwork and placing its importance in the context of Surrealist art at the time. This work is so elegant, so simple, and yet so characteristically Magritte without the money-making symbol-happy obviousness of his later works. Happily, the Surrealist sale saw three astonishing prices for the work of Paul Delvaux, whose star is once again shining after years in the wilderness following the dearth of Russian buyers who previously snapped up his pictures. ‘Nuit de Noël’ made £2.3m, ‘La ville endormie’ made over £6.1m, and ‘Belles de nuit’ made over £4m.
The happy surprise of the sale was Michael Andrews’s brilliant ‘School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna’, which fetched a whopping £6,060,000, setting a new auction record by a mile for the artist. I honestly cannot recall a work of this type making such a sum, but the figurative-image buyer of 2025 could not have found a better example of post-war British art. It was a marvel of technique and well-marketed too by Christie’s, who could have set the picture in the context of a Modern British sale, which might have been an error.
I was delighted to see a real rarity for a London auction season: a decent Modigliani oil for sale that wasn’t priced at an overly aggressive estimate. The Portrait, a painting depicting Lunia Czechowska (a lifelong friend of the artist’s dealer Leopold Zborowski), was priced at £4-7m but made an outstanding £6.3m. The challenge in securing such works for sale is in creating a positive sale story for the seller without pushing expectations too high. The auction house business getter must keep the estimate as low as possible—this is a strategic vehicle to garner bidding and thus a resultant high final price. So often, with gems like this ‘Modi’, we have seen the houses overestimate their wares—only to wonder as they are ‘bought in’ (remain unsold).
Perhaps most importantly for the trade, it was interesting to read that Christie’s auctions attracted bidders from all over the world, with 53% from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, 34% from the Americas, and 13% from Asia. I do get the feeling that Christie’s gauged this sale as if the pricing barometer had been recalibrated over the new year. Amidst the good news rhetoric, there can be no question that these sales were a sigh of relief—especially for the modern art experts—and we are back to some kind of normality, even in a post-Brexit, mid-Labour, London.
So, onwards to TEFAF Maastricht, and I shall be heading out to the Low Countries on Wednesday for three days. If you are at the fair for the vernissage, please let me know, and as ever, use an advisor when you are buying expensive works of art—there are countless pitfalls to be navigated in both the buying and selling process.