The Winners and Losers of New York Auction Week

The marquee evening auctions in New York are the art market’s biannual blood sport. It’s when Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips have five days to off-load masterpieces at higher price points than their archrival houses. It’s the closest the art world gets to a battlefield, with chairmen and specialists marketing their consignments with gusto before ultimately letting the open market decide what paintings are worth. The entire ecosystem depends on the major evening sales. The results are the only way to get hard data on how collectors judge the value of a painting, a rare public price tag in an unregulated industry held together by handshake deals and unreported sales.

After a fight, it’s natural to tell who came out on top and who stumbled. Below, the winners and losers of the November 2025 evening sales in New York.

WINNER: SOTHEBY’S

Selling the second most expensive artwork at auction of all time would probably make you a winner in any auction season. Tasked with selling a Gustav Klimt from the collection of the late cosmetics billionaire Leonard Lauder, Sotheby’s slapped an ambitious $150 million estimate on the lot and scraped together a third-party guarantee before the sale. The painting sold for much more than $150 million—bidding pushed the Klimt to an astonishing $236.4 million. But Sotheby’s seized the week in other ways too. The house monopolized the attention economy during a week when earning eyeballs is the name of the game. With the reopening of the Breuer building came lines around the block, and lines to see work once you were inside—all of it dutifully documented on social media. The provenance was also key, as the Klimt came from the collection of Leonard Lauder, the longtime Whitney trustee who gave his Cubist masterworks to The Met before he died…and look at that, The Met just happened to put those works on view this week in the European-painting and sculpture galleries. Sotheby’s also had a selfie-generating machine in Maurizio Cattelan’s America, which was bought by, of all people, Ripley’s Believe It or Not. “Our number one idea is to keep things free-flowing,” a Ripley’s exec said. “Number two is making sure nothing gets clogged up and flushes away future possibilities.”

WINNER: BOOKSHELVES AND TABLES

Christie’s had a somewhat controversial install of work from the collection of Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson. Specialists hung one gallery almost identically to their Chicago apartment (sans the wraparound lakeside views) with the Cindy Sherman way up high and a Warhol above a fake fireplace. Very prominently featured were the couple’s furniture pieces, including two bookshelves by Diego Giacometti and two ultrarare Giacometti coffee tables. And when they came on the block at the evening sale, the two bookcases, one after another, commanded fierce bidding wars, flying past their high estimates, the functioning furniture outselling the paintings. It was a bit mystifying to watch multiple bidders chase one of the chicer Giacometti design grails on offer, a low table with fox heads, to a final price of $4.5 million, more than the Princes and the Peytons and many of the Warhols. These things are just part of the game these days. Appropriately enough, I walked into a collector’s living room this week, and there was a Giacometti table.

WINNER: LAUDER WORK ON PAPER

Not just the Klimt—basically all of the Leonard Lauder collection was out of reach for even a mega-collector with a ton of money in the bank. Which makes it all the more charming that, in the day sale, there were a few choice works on paper offered for a cheap-sounding four figures. Lauder bought them from galleries in the ’70s and ’80s: Elizabeth Murray and Joel Shapiro from Paula Cooper, and the Dorothea Rockburne from John Weber. This week, the works on paper all had an approachable low estimate of $5,000. They ended up selling for a lot more—nearly ten times that for the Murray as well as the Rockburne—but compared to the Klimt, still affordable-ish!

WINNER: KAZAKHSTAN

A fun quirk of following along with an auction is that when someone comes in to bid online, the auctioneer is obliged to state their location, to ground the person’s existence in the temporal world, or something like that. Oftentimes they’ll be phoning in from Greenwich or Palm Beach or Aspen, the usual haunts of the .0001 percent. So it was a treat that, when the Firelei Báez painting started attracting a wave of bidders, Yü-Ge Wang clearly mentioned “the online bidder from Kazakhstan.” I was not aware of any mega-collectors from Kazakhstan. Clearly there’s at least one. Maybe it’s this guy.

WINNER: DEAD PAINTERS

A few long-gone painters seemed to be getting their groove back. Nobody more so than Frida Kahlo, who set a new record for a work by a female artist sold at auction. Two Milton Avery paintings popped off at the Christie’s day sale, with one selling for more than three times the high estimate. More than a year after the Tom Wesselmann retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a number of his works that came up for auction shattered their high estimates. Great American Nude #41 sold for $1.2 million above a $700,000 high estimate at Christie’s evening sale, and the next day more Wesselmanns outperformed expectations during the day sales—one sold for nearly six times the high estimate.

LOSER: SLOTTING THE WRONG PAINTING IN A PRIMO SPOT

Happens all the time: right artist, wrong painting. No one is doubting the moment that Kerry James Marshall is having—his show with the Royal Academy in London is generally considered to be the strongest museum survey this year, maybe of the last few years. But when an untitled Marshall of a couple embracing before a sunset came up at Sotheby’s Tuesday, the crowd was still basking in the glow of the Klimt and it failed to produce a single bid. The next night, a Marshall from a different series, Portrait of John Punch (Angry Black Man 1646), hammered beyond its highest estimate at Christie’s after a bidding war. Just a better picture, the market decided. Another fiercely in-demand painter of the moment is Cecily Brown. At Sotheby’s on Tuesday, collectors desperately chased High Society, a painting recently seen at her survey at the Barnes. When the dust settled, the price was $9.8 million, nearly breaking the $10 million threshold. The following night at Christie’s, another work by Brown came up, and it was the only pass of the night. It’s all about finding the right example.

LOSER: THE THUNDERBOLT

What’s the deal with that enormous gold nugget at Phillips? All I know is that it was the second most famous solid-gold object offered by the auction houses this week—number two (sorry!) by a lot. I guess it’s the longest gold nugget ever discovered? It’s called, excuse me, The Thunderbolt? I do know that it’s one of the stranger things that an auction house has ever put into the middle of a contemporary art sale, especially given that, well, it’s not art and it was formed through hydrothermal processes over millions of years, so it’s not contemporary. It also didn’t sell.

LOSER: BREUER BUILDING WI-FI

There were some connectivity issues at the start of the Now sale on Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s. They figured the issue out quickly enough, thank God. But going forward, let’s all make sure the Breuer’s wired for Wi-Fi.

LOSER: KLIMT UNDERBIDDERS

We all knew that the Klimt portrait was one of those once-in-a-lifetime masterpieces that never come to auction—and that was before the record-breaking price tag. So you can imagine that the collectors who didn’t end up getting it might be feeling a pang of regret these last few days. In my reporting on the sale, I revealed that the underbidders included Ken Griffin, the Palm Beach–based billionaire founder of Citadel, who in recent years has loaned his masterpieces to the Norton Museum of Art. And it would have been really nice to see that Klimt in the Norton. Another was Rosaline Wong, a somewhat secretive Chinese collector who still is generous enough to put her works on view in institutions, most prominently in the Van Gogh Museum for its show of Klimt. Whoever is on the phone with Julian Dawes, we hope they let the public peek at the thing from time to time.

LOSER: ART MARKET DOOMSAYING

It seems like the art market is not destined to dwindle until it completely collapses. There is no doubt an appetite for true greatness on canvas, as evidenced by the fact that every house’s sales were on an upswing compared to a year ago. For years, the clickbait headlines have fearmongered about collapsing markets, galleries closing, collectors shutting checkbooks—but any art market where multiple people want a $236 million painting can’t be all that bad. And beyond the Klimt, the houses did serious business across the board, into the day sales. By all indications, the vibes were good.

Then again, there’s always the next test, and Miami is coming up right around the corner.

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