Christie’s reported a 20 percent decline in its total sales, plummeting from $8.4 billion in 2022 to $6.2 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s projected in December that its 2023 sales would total $8 billion, less than the equivalent figure from the previous year.

The downturn follows a financial peak in 2022, precipitated by a surge in collecting during the pandemic. Advisors, gallerists, and auction house specialists have told ARTnews recently that, over the last six months, they’ve seen first-hand the significant slowdown in art sales.

Other analyses of the art market show an even starker drop-off. In a recent report by industry analyst Art Tactic, which tracks art sales data globally, the combined auction sales across Phillips, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s amounted to $11.2 billion in 2023, a 19 percent decrease from 2022. (This figure excludes sums generated through private sales.)

Meanwhile, the cumulative sales for the top ten artworks at the three auction houses exhibited a significant drop, totaling $660 million in 2023 compared to $1.1 billion in 2022—a nearly 50 percent decrease. In 2021 and 2022, the prices for top artworks consistently increased, with few works in the top ten selling for less than $50 million. Last year, however, four of the top ten artworks sold for under $50 million—far more than in previous years.

A full view of the economic situation is not yet available, as Phillips has yet to disclose its 2023 results. In 2022, the three auction houses collectively generated $17.7 million in sales and Phillips saw a 10 percent increase from 2021, reaching $1.3 billion in 2022. (Phillips declined to respond to inquiries about its 2023 figures.)

Beyond the auction circuit, where prices are transparent, contemporary art galleries featuring earlier and mid-career artists told ARTnews last month that they had experienced significant pullback in buying, particularly from U.S.-based collectors, starting early last year. Multiple gallerists said that their sales were down as much as 25 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year.

The slower sales environment persisted through Art Basel Miami beach, which has become an important venue for young dealers aiming to boost their year-end sales totals. By the fair’s end, ARTnews found that nearly 50 small-scale galleries participating in ABMB’s specialist sections reported making only $1.6 million combined. This figure represents a minuscule portion of the $41.5 million generated through the sales of just three works disclosed by mega-dealers David Zwirner, Pace, and Gagosian during the fair’s initial days.

The 1795 painting depicts Washington toward the end of his presidency, and is one of more than 100 portraits of him that Stuart painted. The Met, for its part, owns one more, also from 1795, that is more famous than this one; that work is among the most high-profile works in the museum’s holdings.

At Christie’s, the Stuart painting is expected to sell for between $1.5 million and $2.5 million, making it one of the top lots of the auction. It is not, however, likely to displace Stuart’s auction record, set in 2018 by the sale of another Washington portrait that had been held by Peggy and David Rockefeller that was bought for $11.5 million.

The Art Newspaper first reported news of the Stuart painting’s sale on Wednesday.

Museum’s regularly sell works from their holdings in a practice known as deaccessioning. Typically, museums auction pieces that are deemed duplicates of ones they already hold or are no longer considered relevant to their institutional purview.

In the case of the Met, the money brought in through the sale of the Stuart work will support a fund dedicated to future acquisitions, putting it in line with Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) guidelines which stipulated that institutions can deaccession objects, so long as doing so aids in maintaining their collections.

During the pandemic, the AAMD loosened those guidelines, allowing museums to take greater liberties in selling art at auction. But doing so was periodically met with scandal, as was the case in 2020, when the Baltimore Museum of Art attempted to sell works by Andy Warhol, Brice Marden, and others in the name of diversity, only to toss out the plan at the last minute as pushback mounted.

The Met itself has deaccessioned works from its holdings in recent years, most notably a Pablo Picasso sculpture that sold at Christie’s for $45 million in 2022.

Despite the Emily Fisher Landau sale at Sotheby’s being anchored by Pablo Picasso’s 1932 painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter, Femme à la montre, it was Martin who people were talking about over champagne and white wine both before and after the sale. Grey Stone II had the night’s deepest bidding and eventually hammered at $16 million, more than double its low estimate. With buyers fees, the final price was $18.7 million. That price earned Grey Stone II the title of the most expensive work by Martin to ever sell at auction, a title previously held by Untitled #44, which also sold at Sotheby’s, for $17.7 million last fall during the Macklowe sale.

Keen observers of Martin’s market won’t be surprised by the fact that her work is reaching such heights. Martin is part of a group of historically important artists, including Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, all of whom, not coincidentally, are women who have not been as monetarily appreciated as their male counterparts. Grey Stone II was arguably the perfect work for this season, which saw a return to the importance of provenance, rarity, and historical importance.

“That painting, Graystone II, was a unicorn,” David Galperin, a senior vice president, head of contemporary art, and co-head of marquee sales at Sotheby’s told ARTnews. “It’s the painting that the market has been waiting on for a long, long time.” According to Galperin, Greystone II is one of the earliest examples of Martin “homing in on her archetypal minimal grid compositions” and only one of three large scale works on which Martin used gold leaf. The other two are in museum collections at MoMA and SFMOMA.

The work was cleverly priced. “The specialists at Sotheby’s saw a great amount of interest in the work,” said Masha Golovina, the executive vice president of acquisitions at the fractional art startup Masterworks. “Interest is frequently a function of the estimates. When a historic work could possibly be bought for between $6 million and $8 million dollars that sends a very specific message to the market people who might consider bidding.” 

Recent record-breaking works by Martin that have come up for auction have, in fact, all carried roughly the same estimate dating back to May 2016 when, at Christie’s postwar and contemporary evening sale, Orange Grove (1965) sold for $10.7 million (with fees) against an estimate of $6.5 million to $8.5 million. During the Macklowe sale in 2021 and this month’s Fisher Landau sale, the estimates for Agnes Martin paintings that went on to break her auction record were less than those at an evening sale nearly seven years ago. 

“What we are seeing is the art world asking why artists like Martin, and Mitchell, and Krasner have markets that are significantly lower than their male counterparts,” Marc Glimcher, the chief executive of Pace Gallery told ARTnews. Pace is the only gallery to have ever represented the artist and Marc Glimcher’s father, Pace founder Arne Glimcher, published what some consider the seminal text of Martin’s life and works, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances in 2012, eight years after her death at 92.

“Agnes made about 450 paintings in her lifetime. Or rather, there survive about 450 paintings. When she discovered the grid, in 1960, she destroyed everything she’d made before that point, and she’d been working since the 1930s,” Glimcher said. There are only 60 such grids that survive, of which, according to Glimcher, only five could possibly come to market over the next decade. 

Apart from their rarity and beauty, Martin’s work holds a particular place in the art world, not only for collectors but also for historians and artists: For many she stands as an inspirational character, who like Mark Rothko, represents a purity of artistic mission and eschewed the commercial and financial trappings of the market.

Glimcher described the quickening of Martin’s market as “a moment that has been in the making for a while” and analogous to Rothko’s market in the early aughts. In the 1990s, acquiring a Rothko at auction would cost between $1 million and $3 million. Over the course of  five or so years, that price rose steadily between $3 million to $6 million. 

“Then there was this auction of Tom Hill’s blue and yellow Rothko,” said Glimcher, referring to Rothko’s 1954 painting No. 6 (Yellow, White, Blue over Yellow on Gray), which sold for $17.36 million at Sotheby’s in 2004 and is now owned by the collector Tom Hill. “It was estimated for between six and eight million and sold for 17, and everybody thought, ‘Oh my God! The world’s gone insane! We all sat in the auction floor thinking everyone’s lost their minds. Now you can’t get a work on paper for $17 million.”

The steady increase in Rothko’s market is the same logarithmic change that Glimcher sees happening in Martin’s market. The fact that Martin’s work is so rare—Glimcher estimates about half of her paintings are held by institutions and says there was nothing left in the estate when she passed—means that with each year the prices at auction will likely rise.

“The real issue is that the work is finite, as in Martin always had an audience but the work was never that valuable, so it was never traded,” said Anthony Meier, the San Francisco-based art dealer and president of the Art Dealers Association of America. “When compared to her male counterparts of that vintage, the price achieved at Sotheby’s, just like Christie’s in 2016, is absolutely cheap.” 

Meier said the result at the Fisher Landau sale was simple to qualify: beauty and quality rule. “Yes, the art market is down, yes, the world is in a precarious place. But Grey Stone II was a glorious thing that’s not coming around again. For an all-time great artist? It was a bargain. Good luck finding another one.”

The night was notable for the depth of bidding both in the room and on the phones; American bidders were an especially strong presence throughout the evening, the house saidat a post-sale press conference. Applause broke out no fewer than six times in the course of the evening, including a round of applause for auctioneer Jussi Pylkkänen, who helmed the first half of the sale and gave his final performance before retiring after 38 years with the house. 

“It was a solid performance,” advisor Todd Levin told ARTnews on his way out of the sale room. “They did a good job with the estimates, and it was livelier than the last two nights.”

Advisor David Norman described the sale as “quite remarkable, especially when world events are so perilous.”

“It was an excellent sale, with lots of good, fresh material, which is exactly what the market wants,”  Norman told ARTnews after the auction. “Works that were making a repeat performance, like the Magritte, did extremely well,” he added, referring to L’empire des lumières (1949), which sold for a $30 million hammer price, or $34.9 million with fees, just shy of its high estimate.

Thursday’s sale marked the third night of New York’s marquee fall auction season. It followed a subdued $107.5 million debut sale of 21st-century work on Monday, which nonetheless set several records, and a white-glove sale of 31 works from the Emily Fisher Landau Collection at Sotheby’s on Tuesday that totaled $406 million, led by Femme à la montre, a 1932 Pablo Picasso painting of his young lover Marie-Thérèse Walter that fetched $139 million to become the second-priciest painting by the Spaniard ever to sell at auction. 

Thursday’s sale at Christie’s was led by Impressionist Claude Monet’s Le Bassin aux nymphéas, ca. 1917-1919, spanning nearly seven feet wide. It hammered for $64 million against a high estimate of $65 million to a phone bidder courtesy of the house’s Alex Marshall after just over a minute’s worth of bidding. With the house’s fees, the painting cost $74 million.

Alex Rotter, chairman of the 20th- and 21st-century art department, secured the night’s second highest sale, Francis Bacon’s Figure in Movement, 1976, also after about a minute-long contest, at a hammer price of $45 million. That was shy of the $50 million estimate but good enough for the seller, and with fees, the painting went for $52.2 million. The work had been off the market since the year after it was created and is considered part of a group of works painted following the death of the artist’s beloved partner George Dyer in 1971. 

Among the other top lots of the sale, and one of the record-setters, was California artist Richard Diebenkorn’s Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad, 1965, which had been off the market since 1969 and shows the deep influence of Henri Matisse, whose work he saw in quantity on a trip to the Soviet Union. It hammered at $40 million on an estimate of $25 million, or $46.4 million with fees to become the fourth-priciest lot of the night, after a five-minute contest between a bidder in the room and a phone bidder, ultimately going to the latter. 

Another major record was set for Arshile Gorky, whose 1946 painting Charred Beloved I, made shortly after a fire in Gorky’s home that year in which he lost some 20 paintings, hammered at $20 million, its presale estimate, or $23.4 million with fees. The painting was being sold by David Geffen, who had owned it for 30 years; it had a great provenance, including having been owned by publishing magnate S. I. Newhouse. Gorky’s previous record of $14 million was set in November 2018 by the 1944 painting Good Afternoon, Mrs. Lincoln, which was sold as part of the collection of Barney Ebsworth.

The number four lot was Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange), 1955, which hammered for $40 million to a phone bidder via the house’s Vanessa Fusco against a $45 million estimate, selling for $46.4 million with fees. The artist is currently the subject of a massive retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The same work was sold at Sotheby’s as part of the legendary Paul and Bunny Mellon’s collection in 2014, after they had owned it for more than four decades, and was on display at a recent Art Basel fair for $60 million. 

One of the longer contests was for Picasso’s Femme endormie, a painting showing the shape of his sleeping young lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Against a high estimate of $35 million, it hammered for $37 million to a phone bidder via the house’s Xin Li, who works with Chinese buyers, after a three-and-a-half-minute contest to rank as the fifth-highest-selling lot, for $43 million with fees. 

And a record was set for Fernando Botero, who died earlier this year, by the same painting that set his record at auction in 2006. The painting The Musicians from 1979 sold for a $4.2 million hammer price against a $3.5 million estimate to Christie’s specialist Maria Los on the phones, or $5.1 million with fees.

Meanwhile, the three Paul Cézanne  works being sold by the Museum Langmatt, which the Museum has said is necessary to maintain solvency, were all successful. Fruits et pot de gingembre (1890-1893) led the three, hammering at $33.5 million to Christie’s Rotter with a bidder on the phone, or $38.9 million with fees. That figure was just above its low estimate of $35 million.

The sale was also notable for the strong results for work by women artists, including new records for Joan Mitchell, Joan Snyder, Tamara de Lempicka, and Barbara Hepworth. Mitchell’s auction record was reset when an Untitled painting from circa 1959 sold for $29.2 million with fees. The Abstract Expressionist’s previous record was set in 2018 by Blueberry (1969), which sold for $16.6 million at Christie’s in New York. Meanwhile, Hepworth’s sculpture The Family of Man: Ancestor II (1974) sold to a woman in the room for a 9.7 million hammer price, or $11.6 million with fees. It had an estimate of $4 to $6 million.

Some of the drama may have been drained for observers who noted that about half of the lots in the sale were guaranteed to sell, with either a guaranteed price by the house or a third-party bidder. Many of the bidding contests for high-ticket items went by quickly, with the more spirited contests coming for some of the night’s lesser-known artists. 

“Third-party bids are essential elements for the success of the auctions and are here to stay,” Norman said, “whether they insure a sale to one bidder or spur competition by giving confidence to other bidders that the value was corroborated by the secured bid.

“And,” he added, “I think it might have been Jussi’s best auctioneering ever.”

Held on Tuesday night, the sale was dedicated to art made in the 21st century and hammered at $88.4 million, about $8 million short of its $96 million presale estimate. With premium, it netted just $107.5 million across 42 lots.

Records usually boost morale during lackluster sales, and indeed, there were four during this auction: Jadé Fadojutimi, Jenna Gribbon, Jia Aili, and Ilana Savdie all saw new benchmarks set. But overall, the atmosphere was subdued, with many of the most valuable lots failing to reach their low estimates.

Thirteen of the lots were secured with financial backing via in-house or third-party guarantees. Even still, the result fell below the $114 million achieved in last year’s equivalent sale, which featured even fewer lots.

Notable works by Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat are typically surefire hits at auction, but even these pieces could not inject momentum.

Twombly’s Untitled (Bacchus 1st Version II), a red-hued abstraction painted on a wood panel, was estimated to fetch a price up to $25 million. The large painting had last been exhibited publicly at a Gagosian-organized show in Moscow in 2008, and if bidders had hotly anticipated its return to market, it did not show in the bidding. The piece hammered at $17 million, well below its low estimate, going to a bidder in the room for a final price of $20 million.

Meanwhile, a 1981 untitled painting by Basquiat hammered at its low estimate of $10 million, going for $11.9 million with fees. Works by John Currin, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, George Condo, and Mark Bradford similarly struggled to attract attention, with each failing to make it past its low estimate.

“[Christie’s] did a good job of pricing things right, but it was still stressful, I think, behind the rostrum,” art adviser Hugo Nathan told ARTnews. “The most obvious thing is that the artists that were leading the market ten years ago—Jeff Koons, John Currin—aren’t seeing the results they used to.”

Instead, it was artists with less established markets that shined here—most notably female figurative painters.

A painting by the Berlin-based artist Stefanie Heinze was the sale’s opening lot. It hammered at $190,000, more than three times the estimate of $60,000, going to a bidder on the phone with a Christie’s New York contemporary art specialist. That work was followed by Los Angeles–based painter Jenna Gribbon’s Regarding Me Regarding You and Me (2020). The painting, an image of Gribbon’s nude partner, was expected to sell for $150,000; it sold for more than three times that sum, finding a buyer for a price of $478,800 with premium.

Jenny Saville’s Persephone (2019–21), an image of a woman’s head surrounded by gestural pink brushstrokes, hammered above its high estimate of $3 million, selling for a final price of $3.7 million with fees.

Paintings by Jadé Fadojutimi and Jia Aili went for $4 million and $1.7 million, respectively. Those results put these paintings among the few lots by living artists made in the last few years to sell in the seven figures— each high of the figures were new records for the artists.

A work by Brooklyn-based painter Sanya Kantarovsky provided one of the night’s few surprises. His 2022 painting Charnal Field, featuring a partially underwater skeleton, went for $201,600, nearly doubling its high estimate. The painting ultimate sold to a bidder on the phone with Tan Bo, a representative based in Christie’s Beijing office.

Robert Colescott’s Eat dem Taters (1975), a painting that replaces the potato eaters of a famed van Gogh painting with Black figures, likewise fared well. Relatives of American art historian Robert Rosenblum, who died in 2006, had owned the painting since the year it was made and had even loaned it to a recent New Museum survey for Colescott. The work, one of the few historically significant lots in the sale that wasn’t valued in the high millions, went for $3.9 million total with fees, meeting its high estimate.

Correction, 11/8/23, 10:05 a.m.: A previous version of this post misstated how many records were set during this auction. There were four, not none.

In the virtual tour of the Christie’s estate sale for oil heir Gordon Getty and his wife Ann, Alex Clausen noticed an antique nautical map, known as a portolan chart. Christie’s had dated the item between 1500 and 1525, and given it an estimate between $100,000 and $150,000. Getty and his wife had also purchased it from Christie’s during an auction in 1993.

Clausen, who is president of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc., suspected it was much older. In October of last year, Clausen and his team purchased the map at Christie’s for $239,400.

After months of research—including pigment analysis, multi-spectral imaging, carbon dating tests, as well as consultations with scholars and cataloguers—Clausen and his team determined the vellum map was likely made in Venice and from 1360.

This new date made the purchase from the Getty estate the oldest portolan chart in the US—older than the ones owned by the business titans and portolan hunters Henry Huntington, J. P. Morgan, or James Ford Bell, or the ones on display at the Morgan Library and Museum and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Clausen’s is also the fourth-oldest surviving “complete” portolan chart of Europe.

To put that date in context, the map Clausen purchased from Christie’s last fall was made approximately 130 years before Columbus first reached the New World. 

Clausen and his team named the map the Rex Tholomeus Portolan Chart of 1360, for its detailed homage to Claudius Ptolemy, the 2nd century historian, mathematician and geographer.

Provenance information about the map includes its initial discovery by Italian scholar Pietro Amat di San Filippo in the library of Prince Corsini’s palace in Florence in 1888, where it was “tentatively dated” from 1347 to 1354. The portolan was included in several published studies, including one by British astronomer and geographer Arthur C. Hinks in 1929, that concluded it was produced in the 14th century. Prior to its two appearances at Christie’s, the map belonged to Anglo-Italian photographer John Alfred Spranger. Spranger’s daughter Elizabeth Graff was the consigner for the first Christie’s auction in 1993.

On the website for Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, the listing for the Rex Tholomeus Portolan Chart of 1360 says “price on request.” However, company CEO Barry Lawrence Ruderman confirmed to ARTnews the price is $7.5 million.

While the price puts the portolan in the realm of only the most wealthy map collectors, Clausen told the Los Angeles Times he imagines a university or museum might want to purchase it for public display and additional research.

With London and Paris auctions behind us, all eyes are on the New York evening sales—the final fall touchstone of the art market—which kick off November 7 with Christie’s 21st century evening sale, led by Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Bacchus 1st Version II), which carries an $18 million–25 million estimate. But the sales this year come amid a far different economy and auction market than last year.

For even casual art market observers, the phrase “market correction” has been ubiquitous since at least this past spring’s New York sales, the market’s other major defining period. In May, Sotheby’s pulled five lots from their contemporary evening sale. The move, along with multiple bank failures and the much-talked-about end of the “cheap money” era , led some insiders to predict a correction to the market’s top end. Others noted that the previously white-hot ultra-contemporary market had noticeably cooled.

Even then, there were questions about whether the art market’s post-Covid bounce-back, which roughly tracked the frothiness around other alternative assets beginning in 2021, had begun to fade. Last year’s UBS Art Basel Report noted that public auctions generated $26.3 billion in 2021, a 47 percent increase over the previous year. Meanwhile, this year’s report (on 2022) noted a 2 percent decrease over 2021’s total. The auction houses seemed to quietly acknowledge the new climate, with one New York–based auction house chairman telling ARTnews in May that the major houses were being “sensibly aggressive” in negotiations with potential consignors, as they tried to draw strong works to the block.

It is, of course, difficult to directly compare one year to another, given how much the auction market seems to be at the mercy of large estates coming to market. Last year was no different, supercharged as it was by the Harry and Linda Macklowe collection, which famously came to auction, thanks to a bitter divorce and backed by a court order . That sale drew $922.2 million, making it the most valuable single-owner sale ever to be auctioned. That record was promptly broken in November by the Paul Allen sale, which drew $1.5 billion. And then there was the sale of Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, which Larry Gagosian bought at Christie’s for $195 million , making it the most expensive work by a 20th-century artist ever to be sold at auction. There are marquee collections coming up for auction this year—for example, Emily Fisher Landau’s, with its pristine Picasso, at Sotheby’s—but on the global auction scale that’s comparing apples to Apple stock.

Those headline-grabbing results hid a wider shift among bidders, according to Drew Watson, head of art services with Bank of America Private Bank. “If you scratch beneath the surface last fall, and you looked at the evening sales, and especially the day sales, you can see that there was less depth of bidding than we had gotten used to,” Watson told ARTnews. “A lot of things were selling at the low estimate on the reserve, even as sell-through rates still looked okay.”

There are other indications of the market softening. Auction sales at the three main houses during London’s Frieze Week evening sales this year were down by 20 percent, with only 80 percent of the works sold, as opposed to last year, when there was reportedly “an air of reassurance in the middle market .” The slip in sales during Frieze week feels like a repeat of the June auctions in London, during which Christie’s saw most lots generate hammer prices near or below low estimates during its 20th and 21st century evening sale. This despite the assurances of Keith Gill, the house’s London head of Impressionist and modern art, who said the house’s strategy consisted of offering “the right works at the right estimates.” Last summer in London, Christie’s three-act evening sale achieved “ few records and fewer fireworks,” despite being bolstered by two paintings by Monet, one from his famous water lilies series, but still brought in £203.9 million. This year their total for the same London June sales was £63.8 million.

So, is the market “corrected” from the Covid boom? It’s hard to say. This year, the Federal Reserve has embarked on its most aggressive campaign of interest rate hikes since the 1980s, in an effort to curb inflation. While some have claimed such hikes have little effect on the ultra-rich, the rates have had a devastating effect on venture capital and the tech industry , among other sectors. It would be silly to suggest that collectors alone are immune. The obvious other data point being the exploding Covid art market in 2021, when interest rates hit their all-time low. One doesn’t get wealthy enough to spend millions on a painting by ignoring macroeconomics.  

The reality is this: the market fluctuates, often dramatically. In 2017, the UBS Art Basel Report found that the auction market in 2016 had tanked 26 percent from 2015. The following year, it jumped 27 percent. The year 2019 saw a 17 percent drop from the previous year and 2020 was a 30 percent decline from 2019. And, of course, all that was sorted by 47 percent jump in 2021. 

The market dips and bounces back, as Josh Baer noted in a recent episode of the BaerFaxt podcast. “There’s always a new group coming in supporting the market,” Baer said. “Somebody will step into the fray and some people will move on. Nothing is new.” At the end of the day, with collectors, he added, what it really comes down to is “what’s going on with the stuff I collect.”

Together, the three houses pulled in a collective £139 million ($168 million) with fees. (That figure excludes the sum from a single-owner sale at Christie’s last week.) The evening sales hammered at a total of £112 million ($136 million), well below the £130 million combined low estimate. Across the eight total sales dedicated to contemporary art conducted by the houses, some 622 artworks were for sale, of which only 500 works, or 80 percent, of them sold.

According to data collected by Pi-eX, an auction data analyst, the total between day and evening sales was down 18 percent from last year’s equivalent sales, a far cry from the £232 million ($301.6 million) achieved in 2022.

Combined, the sum brought in across the three evening sales dedicated to contemporary and modern was a 20 percent drop from the collective £172 million ($210.5 million) with fees that was brought in last year during the same period.

The dip signals some reticence market-wide ahead of a forthcoming tranche of evening sales scheduled to take place next month in New York. A sale of contemporary artworks from the collection of Liu Yiqian, the founder of Shanghai’s Long Museum at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong earlier this month unfolded in similar fashion, surprising market watchers when it brought in just $69.5 million. The final sum fell far from its target of $95.4 million.

During Christie’s modern and contemporary art sale, a 1918 painting by the Dutch-French artist Kees van Dongen emerged as the leading lot of the week. The work, La Quiétude, went for £10.8 million ($14 million) with buyer’s fees, selling for three times its presale estimate. Following closely behind, value-wise, was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Future Sciences Versus the Man (1982), which brought in £10.4 million ($13.5 million).

Meanwhile, the painter Paula Rego, who died in June of last year at the age of 87, was among the top-selling artists. Rego’s Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia,’ a figurative scene featuring Rego’s former assistant Lila Nunes, set a new benchmark for the artist at auction, with a record price of £3.1 million.

In total, Christie’s London contemporary art evening sale generated £44.7 million ($54.5 million), with 88 percent of the lots sold.

At Sotheby’s, Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (1986), one of the major lots headed to auction last week, failed to sell. As a result, the evening sale total came to just £24.4 million ($31.7 million), falling below its presale target of £39.9 million ($48 million).

The houses’s 21-lot ultra-contemporary “Now” evening sale performed better. It surpassed the presale £9.3 million ($11 million) estimate, bringing in a collective £15.5 million ($18.9 million) with buyer’s fees.

A painting by Iraqi-born painter Mohammed Sami, titled Poor Folk (2019), fetched £558,500 ($680,755), seven times its low estimate. It depicts a prickly cactus on a sheeted bed, and it reset Sami’s record for the second time this year alone. Bidding for the work involved 10 people in the auction room, along with those on the phone with Sotheby’s specialists.

A third of the lots went to buyers based in the US, a Sotheby’s representative said after the sale, while 20 percent of buyers were from Asia.

In that sale, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Six Birds in the Bush (2015) fetched an impressive £2.95 million ($3.6 million), exceeding the estimated value range of £1.2 million–£1.8 million ($1.5 million–$2.2 million) and setting a new record for the British artist. Yiadom-Boakye’s previous record was set in May 2021, when her 2009 figurative work painting Diplomacy III sold for $1.95 million at Christie’s New York.

Meanwhile, the Phillips contemporary art evening sale brought in a respectable £18.3 million, a result that was about on par with last year’s. Records were set this time around for Marina Perez Simão and Francesca Mollett.

The sculpture, which comes with an estimate of £30,000 – £40,000 ($36,400 – $48,450), was a gift from Hockney to Peter and Wendy Richards of Bedfordshire in 1955. While a student at Bradford School of Art, Hockney and his friends had a penchant for hitchhiking to art exhibition across the United Kingdom. 

In 1955, while on their way back to London, Hockney and his schoolmate Norman Stevens found their trip stalled by a heavy rainstorm. The two artists sought refuge on the Richards’ land, under the eaves of their cottage. When Peter and Wendy spotted the waterlogged students, they invited them in, made them tea, and dried their clothes.

When traveling Hockney would often gift a work to those he met along the way. The sculpture, which is thought to be the first of six such cat works that Hockney made and sent out as gifts, was given to the Richards via the mail. The three remained in touch and Hockney continued to send letters and drawings to the couple over the years.

“I really don’t know what to do with the cat,” Hockney once wrote in a letter to the Richards before giving them the sculpture, according to the BBC. “The postman said unless it’s really well packed in plenty of straw and sawdust it would be risky. I think we’ll wait and bring down the cat and plates personally.”

Similar Hockney ceramic cats have done well at auction. In 2011, Bonhams sold one for £40,000 ($48,309), at Christie’s this June another sold for a tidy £94,000 ($114,426).

Also on the block is a large ceramic dish Hockney designed with Stevens and two woodblock and hand-painted cards. The sale will commence on October 23.