A few minutes into Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction on Tuesday night, the pauses between bids began telling their own story. Collectors still showed up for the museum-quality material, particularly blue-chip works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and Vincent van Gogh, but the atmosphere inside the Breuer building often felt cautious rather than euphoric, as buyers weighed estimates carefully and bidding wars appeared only intermittently.
By the end of the evening, Sotheby’s had achieved a total of $303.9 million, with 98 percent of lots finding buyers. While the sale brought in 63 percent more than the equivalent sale last year—marked by the infamous Giacometti flop—the total came in below the presale high estimate of $320.2 million. Overall, the sale’s results reinforced a growing reality across the art market this season: demand remains strong for exceptional works, but conviction still comes with conditions.
As one New York advisor, who asked not to be named, texted me more than halfway through the sale, the evening was “solid financially, but also lacking in energy,” adding that “competition is very tempered.”
(All prices include fees unless otherwise noted.)
Few lots exhibited that spirit more than Pablo Picasso’s 1909 portrait Arlequin (Buste). Held in the Adele and Enrico Donati collection for the last 70 years and estimated in excess of $40 million, the painting was positioned by Sotheby’s as the most important Cubist work to appear at auction in years. The house suggested that the painting was central to the artist’s transition to Cubism and emphasized that it is one of only a handful of 1909 Picasso portraits still in private hands. But bidding for the work, Lot 11 for the night, was surprisingly restrained given the attention paid to the picture. Two bidders ultimately pushed the work to a hammer price of $40 million, or $42.6 million with fees, just above its estimate.
Much of the material in Tuesday’s sale, like the Picasso, came from a named collection. In addition to the Donatis, works came from the collections of David and Shoshanna Wingate, Sybil Shainwald, the Durand-Ruel family, the Barbier-Mueller family, and the Latner family. That concentration of named provenance would be unusual for a single evening sale, if not for how heavily the market has rewarded fresh works with strong collector pedigrees. Just look at the results from Sotheby’s Robert Mnuchin sale last week, or the S.I. Newhouse Jr. sale at Christie’s, whose exhibition, according to the house, drew bigger crowds than the Paul Allen sale, long treated as the benchmark for this kind of trophy-property spectacle.
Jacob King, a New York-based advisor, told ARTnews after the sale that buyers remain “really sensitive still to quality and to price,” adding that “unless it’s really the absolute best, then maybe price goes out the window a little bit.”
The biggest fireworks on Tuesday came at Lot 19, for Matisse’s La Chaise lorraine. Estimated at $25 million, the painting sold for $48.4 million after a bidding battle that stretched past 10 minutes and ultimately became the longest sustained contest of the evening.
The result marked the second-highest price ever achieved for a painting by Matisse at auction and gave the sale its clearest jolt of genuine competition, though even that energy came framed with caution. Helena Newman, auctioneer and chairman of Impressionist and modern art, elegant in a green Victoria Beckham dress, leaned firmly on specialists with indecisive phone bidders. At one point, as the bidding slowed, she snapped: “I’m going to have to ask you to hurry up. The room has been very patient.” There was a gasp, followed by applause, when the picture finally sold, though it was difficult to tell whether the room was celebrating the result or simply relieved the ordeal was over.
Held in the Barbier-Mueller collection for decades, La Chaise lorraine dates to 1919, one of the most important years of Matisse’s Nice period, and belongs to a tiny group of monumental interiors whose sister works now sit in major museums.
Allegra Bettini, Sotheby’s head of modern evening auctions, told ARTnews that collectors responded to the painting because it rewarded close looking. “People [were] showing up for quality and understanding a picture that is not the most obvious for the artist,” she said after the sale.
The evening’s other major Matisse, La Séance du matin, appeared just two lots later. It told a quieter story: estimated at $20 million to $30 million, the work sold for exactly $20 million before fees, ultimately reaching $21.2 million with fees.
Another major test came with Vincent van Gogh’s La Moisson en Provence, a rare watercolor from the artist’s Arles period estimated at $25 million to $35 million. Bidding was more cautious than some specialists had predicted, with only two bidders competing. The watercolor ultimately sold for $29.4 million to a buyer from Asia. Even so, the result still ranked among the strongest ever achieved for a work on paper by the artist and set the second-highest auction price for a van Gogh watercolor. Oddly enough, the picture beat its own previous record for second place; back in 1997, it brought $14.6 million at Sotheby’s London.
Elizabeth Gorayeb, the former senior vice president of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s and current executive director of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, described the work before the sale as “a collector’s picture,” adding that “it’s not flashy” and “not for the novice collector.”
Early in the evening, Giacometti’s La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures) was one of the sale’s stronger tests of bidding at the high end. The sculpture sold for $23.1 million on an estimate of $18 million to $25 million after a five-minute bidding battle between three bidders, a relatively sustained contest in a room where many works sold far more quickly.
Sotheby’s had emphasized throughout the preview that a cast of the work had not appeared at auction since 2018 and that the sculpture belonged to a small group of ambitious multi-figure compositions Giacometti executed around 1950. Unlike some of the evening’s more aggressively guaranteed trophy works, the bidding here felt comparatively organic, with the room visibly paying closer attention as the price climbed.
Works from the collection of Jean and Terry de Gunzburg performed particularly well, extending the momentum from the couple’s headline-grabbing Design Masters sale earlier this spring. Picasso’s Buste de femme sold for $5.4 million, while Paul Klee’s Gartenfigur climbed to $4.63 million after sustained bidding.
Meanwhile, the Donati grouping gave the sale much of its intellectual and emotional texture. In addition to Picasso’s Arlequin (Buste), Wassily Kandinsky’s Rote Tiefe, appearing at auction for the first time, sold for $14.5 million. One of the quieter but more memorable pieces from the Donati group was Yves Tanguy’s Aux Aguets le jour, which had reportedly been gifted directly by the artist to the couple in the 1940s. The surrealist canvas ultimately sold to an Asian collector for $1.79 million.
Some of the evening’s more revealing results came well below the headline trophy lots, where collectors competed for historically important works that also carried the potential to reset artist markets. Varvara Stepanova’s Two Figures came close, selling for $2.3 million after three bidders pursued one of the rare Constructivist oil paintings still in private hands. Sotheby’s had positioned the work as a potential record contender for the Russian avant-garde artist, whose market has deepened as museums and collectors continue revisiting the history of Constructivism.
Elsewhere, Leonor Fini’s Portrait de Alida Valli II sold for $1.15 million, while Leonora Carrington’s El retorno de la osa mayor reached $1.66 million. Neither lot broke records, but both reinforced the continued appetite for women surrealists, a category that has quietly become one of the most reliable pockets of momentum in the broader modern market.
Charles Sheeler’s Windows also drew attention, selling for $2.05 million and landing among the strongest prices achieved for the artist at auction. Meanwhile, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pink Camellia reached $2.56 million, becoming the second-highest price ever achieved for one of the artist’s works on paper.
By the end of the evening, Sotheby’s appeared to achieve precisely what auction houses increasingly prize above all else right now: stability. The sale may not have restored the speculative frenzy that once drove collectors into bidding wars at nearly any price, but it suggested that exceptional material, carefully structured and strategically guaranteed, can still produce strong results in a more selective era.