The 20th/21st-century auction at Christie’s London failed to bank despite having some big names on the roster, closing at just $81.1 million.
The auction came close at the heels of the Sotheby’s London auctions. But unlike Sotheby’s, which proved to be a success (thanks to a Klimt painting) and fetched over $250 million, the Christie’s London auction only managed £63.8 million ($81.1 million) in sales. Many are seeing this as just another sequence in a slow market that is correcting itself while dismissing Sotheby’s auctions as just an outlier. Excluding anomalies like the record-breaking Gustav Klimt painting, neither auction house brought any promising figures.
Many blue-chip artists saw their works being sold even below their low estimates. For instance, ‘Nature Study’, a bronze sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, was sold for £567,000 with fees (compared to pre-sale estimates of £800,000 to £1.2 million). However, the most popular names in the industry managed to continue generating buzz. These included Damien Hirst, Edgar Degas, and David Hockey, all of whom sold well above their pre-sale high estimates.
The best-selling work of the evening at Christie’s London was Calanque-des-Canoubiers-Pointe-de-Bamer-Saint-Tropez (1896), an oil-on-canvas painting by Paul Signac. Selling for £6.7 million ($8.5 million), the painting matched its pre-sale estimates of $7 million–$10.1 million. The work is also scheduled to appear at a 2026 exhibition at Museum Barberini, Germany. Untitled (Pablo Picasso), the 1984 work by Jean-Michel Basquiat which was a tribute to the master, sold for £6.46 million (including fees). This was very close to its high pre-sale estimate of £6.5 million.