How One of New York’s Favorite Art Couples Built Their Exceptional Collection https://ift.tt/PEqs7fH

In 1990, Marc and Livia Straus spent several days with Anselm Kiefer in the Black Forest in southwestern Germany, where the artist maintained a studio. One work, titled Sefirot (1990), stopped the Strauses cold. The artist apparently liked it too—he was planning to keep it for himself.

Livia, a theologian, slipped into an intense back-and-forth with Kiefer about the Kabbalistic ladder embedded in the painting. Marc remembered thinking, “I just have to have this piece.” Moved by the interaction, Kiefer decided to part with the work. That towering piece now lives in the Strauses’ house in Chappaqua, New York, which they built in 1978. The episode is emblematic of how the Strauses collect: by instinct and by sustained engagement with living artists.

Today, Marc and Livia are among New York’s most respected champions of contemporary art. They’ve shaped their collection via decades of conversations in studios around the world. The couple lives between Manhattan and their Chappaqua home, filling their walls with mementos of these intimate experiences. Livia’s fascination with color and spirituality shaped their early taste. Marc is a retired oncologist and poet who gravitates toward difficult work he feels compelled to live with. In 2011, he founded the New York gallery Marc Straus. Together, the pair built Hudson Valley MOCA in Peekskill, New York, in 2004. Many of the works in their deeply personal collection wouldn’t exist without their patronage.

The story of the Strauses’ partnership began long before the Kiefer. Marc and Livia met on the first day of ninth grade in Long Island. They were friends before they started to date in their senior year. “I just knew I was going to marry this girl,” Marc recently told me. I was visiting their Chappaqua home, and he was sitting across the table from Livia. The pair wed in 1964 in their very early twenties. Marc entered medical school, and the pair moved into student housing in Brooklyn. There was barely enough room for the two of them, let alone an art collection.

The Strauses’ first acquisition was Kenneth Noland’s color-field painting Shift (1966), which now hangs in their son’s house. Their taste developed as they lived closely with every piece they bought, especially while they were surviving on modest salaries. Buying just one artwork a year taught them patience and precision. “One piece a year would be a lot for us,” Marc said. “It created a lot of discipline.” He still advocates a slow, thoughtful, and immersive approach to collecting.

While the couple made significant early purchases, they trace the true beginning of their collecting life to 1972. That year, they saw Ellsworth Kelly’s “Chatham” series, which features 14 paintings composed of two panels of solid color joined in upside-down “L” shapes. At the time, they were living in a small apartment in Maryland with two kids and a dog. They spent three months choosing the right “Chatham” work, then another six trying to secure a loan. Their ultimate purchase, Chatham VIII (1971), cost an entire year of Marc’s fellowship salary and took three years to pay off. That thrilling leap, Marc said, solidified their appetite for art.

The Kelly now lives in Marc’s office to the left of his desk. Another wall features Antonio Santín’s Trampolín (2025), a photorealistic painting of a crumpled, intricately patterned carpet. On the opposing wall is Susan Rothenberg’s Accident #3 (1993), part of the artist’s horse crash series. The second iteration of the series lives in the dining area downstairs. Nearly every artwork in the Strauses’ home has a personal anecdote attached. Marc recalls “many thousands” of studio visits around the world and a simple rule: “We never bought something we didn’t install,” he tells me. Living with the work was essential; it was how they learned from it.

Even contentious artist-collector relationships have proven fruitful. Soon after the Strauses moved to Chappaqua, they invited sculptor Richard Serra to make an indoor sculpture for the large gallery room. Serra instead walked the home’s perimeter, came back inside, and announced he knew exactly what he wanted to do: install a massive steel wall that would block their view of the lake. Marc told him he wasn’t legally allowed to build that close to the water. “Then you can’t get a piece,” Serra replied, and left it at that for two years. Eventually, he relented and created a much smaller steel work that sits next to the Kiefer in the main room.

Other acquisitions were more spontaneous. In 2012, Livia brought Marc to visit Jeffrey Gibson’s Brooklyn studio. “If Livia had told me we were going to visit an artist who makes punching bags, I might have skipped it,” Marc jokes. Instead, he walked in, saw a beaded Everlast bag and was dazzled by Gibson’s craftsmanship. According to Marc, Gibson didn’t have the means to complete the work, but they bought Deep Blue Day (2014) as it was. It hangs from the ceiling of their house, only half covered in beads, recalling a moment of collectorly love at first sight.

The Strauses’ passion for emerging art extends internationally as well. On a 2008 research trip through Eastern Europe—one of more than 200 studio visits that year alone—they met Adrian Ghenie, a young Romanian painter who was unknown in the U.S. Marc found himself trying to convince fellow collectors to buy one of the painter’s 8-foot canvases for $10,000. Few did. Today, Ghenie is represented by Pace Gallery and Thaddaeus Ropac.

The deeper the Strauses went into artists’ studios, the more urgent it became to create spaces for the work beyond their own walls. By 2000, their collection was large enough that they needed storage. As Marc recalled, “Livia said, ‘We can’t just put it away. We have to use the art to teach.’” They decided to open Hudson Valley MOCA, a space where their art collection helps engage the community.

Similarly, Marc felt driven to open his gallery after retiring from oncology. His program champions living artists and features unconventional, sometimes bizarre solo shows that include pieces ranging from salvaged-material sculptures to a 43-foot painting. “You’ve always loved helping artists develop their careers,” Livia said to her husband. “It makes perfect sense that…you want to start with young, emerging talents.” For example, Straus has supported Yael Medrez Pier and Anne Samat, who just staged a major installation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025.

Back in their Chappaqua home, the Strauses continue to learn from the art and artists they’ve supported over the years. Marie Watt’s Skywalker/Skyscraper (Portrait of Livia) (2021), in their basement gallery space, exemplifies how embedded their lives are with this work. It uses 15 of the Strauses’s family blankets to create a tower of textiles atop 21 cedar blocks. “I can now track my family history through Marie’s steel-pierced pillar of neatly folded blankets, that steel for me representing the strength of generational ties,” Livia said. “I had worried about what would happen to these memories of my past. Surely my children would have disposed of them. And what better way than to partner with an artist like Marie whose works entwine memory of word, of song, of security, of blanket-ness.”

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/2BbidtE

The Most Influential Artists of 2025 https://ift.tt/lu0HYD7

In 2025, art world influence proves harder than ever to define. Artists are breaking through in radically different ways: viral blockbuster solo exhibitions, sustained institutional recognition, fast-rising gallery momentum, viral robotic art fair presentations, and public advocacy that extends beyond the gallery walls.

This year was unusually volatile. As artists grappled with accelerating AI adoption, cuts to arts funding in the United States, and the aftershocks of climate catastrophe—particularly the devastating fires in Los Angeles—much of the year’s most resonant work addressed contemporary crises. In the face of these conflicts, artists who won a groundbreaking award or received a long-overdue solo exhibition are still cause for celebration. The names on this list, from Amy Sherald, who refused to compromise her values for the sake of an institutional show, to Beeple, who created the year’s biggest art fair spectacle, defined 2025 as they confronted contemporary anxieties and still managed to shock and move us.

Here are Artsy’s most influential artists of 2025.

Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald made headlines this year by walking away from a show. The Baltimore-based painter, who rose to prominence for her 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama, was the subject of a high-profile traveling exhibition, “American Sublime,” organized by SFMOMA and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art this summer. Sherald canceled the tour’s third stop, at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., due to disagreements about her painting Trans Forming Liberty (2024). It was a rare and consequential act of institutional refusal.

The painting depicts a transgender woman posed as the Statue of Liberty. The National Portrait Gallery was considering replacing the work with a video of people reacting to the painting, a strategy to avoid provoking President Donald Trump. Instead of acquiescing, Sherald asserted artistic autonomy and sparked conversation about who gets to define American imagery. “When I understood a video would replace the painting, I decided to cancel,” she said in an interview with the New York Times. “The video would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility and I was opposed to that being a part of the ‘American Sublime’ narrative.” “American Sublime,” in its unadulterated curation, remains on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through April.

—Maxwell Rabb, Staff Writer

Anne Imhof

For 10 days this spring, Anne Imhof’s massive durational performance DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE dominated art world conversation in New York. Staged at the Park Avenue Armory from March 3rd to 12th, the three-hour, open-format experience transformed the Wade Thompson Drill Hall into an immersive environment with no fixed seating and no privileged point of view.

Curated by Klaus Biesenbach, DOOM choreographed a cast that moved fluidly between high and low cultural registers. The performance folded dialogue from Romeo and Juliet into scenes of American high-school angst: Imhof staged tailgate parties atop black Cadillac Escalades and school dances drained of romance. It all unfolded beneath a looming doomsday countdown clock, which promised a catastrophe that never arrived. Instead, audiences got prolonged anticipation and unease.

The groundbreaking piece raised questions about power, alienation, and spectatorship.

Imhof’s last project of this scale was Faust (2017), an immersive performance critiquing power and late capitalism, which earned her the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The making of DOOM will be the subject of a documentary produced by Art21, out next year.

This December, Imhof released an album and booklet titled “Wish You Were Gay,” an extension of her 2024 exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz of the same name. She also opened “Fun ist ein Stahlbad,” an exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Portugal. The centerpiece is a newly commissioned 60-foot swimming pool sculpture.

—M.R.

Arpita Singh

At 88, Arpita Singh is one of India’s best-known artists. She’s celebrated for her stunning, surreal oil paintings, which bring a deeply personal approach to Bengali folklore, mythology, and urban life. Cars, planes, and figures float against her pastel backgrounds. The artist often incorporates text and ink into her work (she’s become a master of watercolor as well). Singh represents a second generation of Indian Modernism, and her paintings reinterpret contemporary life via scenes that feel simultaneously historical, timeless, and new.

Though it opened in 2024, “Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998” at the Barbican set the tone for 2025’s increasing international focus on Indian art. The London show featured Singh’s work alongside that of Nalini Malani, Madhvi Parekh, and other contemporaries. But it was in March that Singh’s paintings received London’s full attention: The Serpentine North opened “Remembering,” her first institutional solo show outside of India. It marked a major turning point for the artist, and for the international art world, which has been slow to appreciate the significance of 20th-century South Asian artists like Singh.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Senior Editor

Ayoung Kim

Ayoung Kim’s slick, futuristic visions have popped up across Asia for the last few years: In 2025, her influence reverberated across the globe. In February, the artist opened “Many Worlds Over” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The show brought together two of the videos from her “Delivery Dancer” series, along with sculptures, wallpapers, and a playable video game based in the same universe. In November, the Performa biennial brought Kim’s live-action interpretation of the films to New York. Now, the full “Delivery Dancer” trilogy is on view in the city as MoMA PS1 hosts the artist’s U.S. solo institutional debut.

These films use cutting-edge techniques—from motion capture to AI—to present a captivating universe where two rival female motorcycle delivery drivers are locked in a sci-fi love story as they race against time. With an aesthetic that references mind-bending action movies like Inception, the films nod to the infinite availability of our always-on contemporary culture. Kim is responding to her perception of Seoul, where she lives. As the artist told me in an interview earlier this year: “This ‘survival game mode’ is embedded in all Korean people in all sectors of society…I wanted to call out this competition.”

—J.T.J.

Beeple

At Art Basel Miami Beach, Beeple propelled himself onto this list with Regular Animals, an installation of robotic dogs topped with the hyper-realistic heads of tech billionaires. It quickly became one of the fair’s most talked-about spectacles.

The machines featured the faces of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and the artist himself. They roamed a transparent pen inside Zero10, the fair’s new digital art section. The dogs periodically entered “Poop Mode,” taking photographs of one another and printing them out from their backsides.

The work sparked conversation about how tech leaders and AI are increasingly shaping how we see the world, as artists like Picasso and Warhol changed people’s perceptions in the 20th century. “There is an analogy; we’re increasingly going to view the world through AI,” Beeple told The Art Newspaper. “We’re also seeing the world through the lens of artists and tech leaders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who shape what we see, probably more than anybody else.”Beeple is known for this type of art world provocation. The digital artist, born Mike Winkelmann, rose to prominence with his record-breaking $69 million NFT sale at Christie’s in 2021.

—M.R.

Danielle Mckinney

Danielle Mckinney’s saturated, cinematic paintings focus on the intimate lives of Black women. The artist depicts her subjects in dimly lit interiors as they lounge, read, smoke, think, and find contentment within themselves. These pieces commanded attention from Maastricht, the Netherlands, to Massachusetts this year.

Mckinney debuted eight new paintings with Marianne Boesky Gallery at TEFAF Maastricht in March. Then, her first U.S. institutional solo show, “Tell Me More,” opened at Massachusetts’s Rose Art Museum in August. She capped off her remarkable year with a solo exhibition at London’s Galerie Max Hetzler, which opened in September.

The 44-year-old artist was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and is now based in New Jersey. Mckinney started her work as a photographer at 15 and earned an MFA in photography from Parsons School of Design in 2013. She only took up painting in 2020, during the pandemic. In just five years, Mckinney has cemented her reputation as an era-defining painter.

—M.R.

Kelly Akashi

Kelly Akashi’s year was marked by perseverance. In January, Los Angeles wildfires destroyed her Altadena home and much of the work for her first exhibition with Lisson Gallery in L.A. Yet the artist moved quickly to remake the show while advocating for fellow artists and art workers who had lost everything.

The Lisson exhibition opened during Frieze Los Angeles and quickly became a highlight of the week. Glass and bronze sculptures filled the gallery, their precision belying the circumstances of their making. A handful of salvaged works revealed the patina of flames and ash. The presentation amplified enduring themes in Akashi’s practice—time, impermanence, personal history—now sharpened by fresh grief.

Akashi’s influence carried throughout the year, with group exhibitions at institutions including the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art in Malibu, California, and The Warehouse in Dallas; a residency at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington; and news of a public commission for JFK Airport’s new Terminal One. Just this month, the Whitney Museum announced that Akashi will create a major terrace commission for the 2026 Whitney Biennial. The work is an homage to the L.A. wildfire victims. It will reimagine the artist’s chimney, the only part of her home that survived.

—Casey Lesser, Editor in Chief

Kerry James Marshall

During London’s packed fall calendar of museum and gallery shows, art world wags recommended one exhibition more than any other: Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy of Arts.

“The Histories,” the artist’s largest European show to date, definitively cemented Marshall’s status as a master of contemporary history painting for a global audience. The survey spanned four decades and documented a creative career spent rewriting and enriching the Eurocentric canon of Western art history by centering Black figures and experiences.

However, the show was not just a retrospective glance at Marshall’s oeuvre. A provocative series of eight new paintings explored the complex and often avoided topic of the active role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. At 70, Marshall continues to contribute to difficult global conversations about history, power, and representation.

—Arun Kakar, Senior Market Editor

Nnena Kalu

British artist Nnena Kalu shattered a glass ceiling in December when she became the first neurodivergent awardee of the Turner Prize. Kalu is known for hypnotic, intuitive sculptures, drawings, and paintings that resist translation or explanation. Instead, they operate as direct expressions of self for the nonverbal artist.

Born in Glasgow in 1966, London-based Kalu repurposes found VHS tape, rope, discarded paper, and other materials to make the vivid sculptures for which she’s best known. Her cocoon-like forms emerge through repetitive wrapping and binding gestures that emphasize the importance of accumulation in her practice.

Long affiliated with ActionSpace, a London-based studio supporting artists with disabilities, Kalu spent decades working outside the mainstream. In 2024, she gained recognition at Manifesta 15 in Barcelona and in a group show, “Conversations,” at Liverpool, England’s Walker Art Gallery.

—M.R.

Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga works with materials like soil, stone, glass, and fiber—alongside sensory elements such as scent and sound—to explore how landscapes absorb human activity and memory related to extraction, migration, and agriculture. This year, the artist powerfully shaped conversations around environmental art.

Nkanga began 2025 with a major MoMA atrium presentation, “Cadence,” which featured sculptures, a monumental woven tapestry, and the sounds of deep breathing and visceral emotion. These interventions transformed the space into a lifelike ecosystem and a site of communal mourning for ecological upheaval.

The artist’s momentum continued in the spring, when Nkanga was celebrated as the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate and opened her exhibition “Each Seed a Body” at Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center. The show centered on a 53-foot installation encrusted with plants and spices connected to North Texas; visitors were invited to kneel down and inhale its essence.

This October, a sprawling tapestry by Nkanga welcomed visitors to Lisson Gallery’s booth at Frieze London. And a week later, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris opened “I dreamt of you in colours,” a major exhibition—on view through February 22, 2026—bringing together early drawings, installations, and recent tapestries that chart the evolution of Nkanga’s practice.

—C.L.

Tyler Mitchell

Tyler Mitchell first entered the cultural spotlight in 2018, at just 23, as the youngest and first Black photographer to shoot Vogue’s cover. What once looked like a breakout moment has hardened into sustained influence. This year, gallery shows, a major Met commission, and a monograph solidified Mitchell’s position as a generational talent. His photographs foreground the lives of Black people, focusing on tenderness, joy, and interiority.

In February, Mitchell presented “Ghost Images,” his first solo exhibition with Gagosian in New York. The gallery mounted another presentation of his work at their Burlington Arcade location in London this September. The Metropolitan Museum of Art tapped into Mitchell’s intimate engagements with Black dandyism and identity by commissioning him to shoot the catalogue for the “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Costume Institute’s show tied to the Met Gala. This placed his images of figures like Spike Lee and Ayo Edebiri in dialogue with a longer visual tradition.

In September, Aperture published a new monograph for the artist, Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real. And the following month, Mitchell’s traveling exhibition of the same name opened in Paris at the MEP – Maison Européenne de la Photographie—marking his first solo exhibition in France.

—M.R.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/lnTF6fE

Christie’s to auction famed portrait of George Washington used on $1 bill. https://ift.tt/fjTYpyd

A portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, commissioned by President James Madison, will be featured during Christie’s Americana Week auctions in January. The oil-on-canvas painting will be offered as part of “We the People: America at 250,” with an estimate of $500,000 to $1 million. The sale will take place on January 23, 2026.

Painted by Stuart, the most prolific portraitist of Washington, the work belongs to a group of approximately 75 portraits in this pose that were produced around 1796. Madison commissioned the painting in 1804, though the artist did not complete it until 1811, reflecting Stuart’s often-delayed working process and his habit of revisiting popular compositions. Washington was known to dislike long portrait sittings, which is why Stuart relied on repeatable formats. Made in the “Athenaeum type” format, the work inspired Washington’s likeness on the one-dollar bill.

At first, the painting’s origins were thought to be dubious; however, Martha Willoughby, a specialist consultant in Christie’s Americana department, told Artnet News that the auction house found a letter from Madison’s secretary confirming its provenance.

The portrait remained with Madison and his family before passing through several prominent American collections, including those of industrialist James W. Ellsworth, art collector William K. Bixby, and Richard L. Clarkson. In 1951, the portrait entered Clarkson University’s collection in New York, where it was stolen by a group of students, though it was recovered after their arrest.

In addition to Washington, Stuart painted other leading figures of the early American republic, including Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and Madison. In January 2024, Stuart’s George Washington (Vaughn type) (1795), another portrait of Washington, was sold for $2.83 million at Christie’s.

The Washington portrait is just one of the highlights of the auction house’s Americana Week, which will comprise nine auctions and approximately 700 lots, running from January 13 to 28, 2026. Other lots include a broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence produced in July 1776, estimated at $3 million–$5 million, and the Steve Jobs–signed contract that founded the Apple Computer Company, estimated at $2 million–$4 million.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/tcwrlIa

The 10 Most Expensive Auction Works in 2025 https://ift.tt/PVxe9gO

After a quieter 2024, the top end of the auction market this year was characterized by blockbuster sales of artworks by seminal artists.

The price for the 100 most expensive lots sold at auction totaled $2.13 billion, up from last year’s total of $1.8 billion. Much of the top-end ballast in the auction market came from the marquee New York sales in November. During that week, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips together made more than $2 billion in sales and set 16 artist auction records. Indeed, 9 of the top 10 lots of the year were sold this fall.

Here, we run down the top 10 lots at auction in 2025. All prices include fees.

Gustav Klimt, Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, 1914

Sold for: $236,360,000

Sotheby’s

Gustav Klimt’s Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer) (1914) sold for $236.36 million, making it the second-most-expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

Part of a sale of works from American philanthropist Leonard A. Lauder’s collection, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer stands at 6 feet tall and depicts Elisabeth Lederer, the Austrian heiress of Klimt’s leading patrons, August and Serena Lederer. The woman is dressed in a Chinese robe and a white shawl with floral patterns, and the work belongs to a group of paintings where Klimt was inspired by East Asian art. The Nazis seized the work in 1939, but eventually, they returned it to Elisabeth’s brother, Erich, in 1948. Lauder acquired the work in 1985 and kept it in his New York home until his passing in June.

Klimt’s previous auction record was held by Dame mit Fächer (1917), which sold for $108 million at Sotheby’s in 2023.

Gustav Klimt, Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow), 1908

Sold for: $86,000,000

Sotheby’s

Painted during a summer retreat to Lake Attersee in Austria, Klimt’s Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow) (1908) fetched $86 million during the Lauder sale. The work exemplifies Klimt’s radical, mosaic-like approach to landscape at the height of his experimentation and is one of his most valuable landscape paintings. The only other landscape by Klimt to sell for more is Birch Forest (1903), which sold for $104.6 million in 2022 at Christie’s.

Blumenwiese was first acquired by the Koller family, who were friends and patrons of Klimt.

Gustav Klimt, Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee), 1916

Sold for: $68,320,000

Sotheby’s

The last of three Klimt masterpieces to appear during the Lauder auction, Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee) (1916), sold for $68.32 million, just below its $70 million estimate. Executed during the artist’s final summer at Lake Attersee, it is the last surviving landscape of his career. It depicts the serene, densely wooded landscape beyond Austria’s Salzkammergut region, a quiet counterpoint to a Europe engulfed in war.

This sale marked Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee’s auction debut. This work appeared in Neue Galerie’s 150th Anniversary Celebration exhibition in 2012 and was displayed at the National Gallery of Canada from 2017 to 2025.

Vincent van Gogh, Piles de romans parisiens et roses dans une verre (Romans parisiens), 1887

Sold for $62,710,000

Sotheby’s

Vincent van Gogh’s Piles de romans parisiens et roses dans une verre (Romans parisiens) (1887) sold for $62.71 million after a seven-minute bidding battle at Sotheby’s in November. The work was part of the 13-lot sale of works from the collection of Cindy and Jay Pritzker and was acquired by Hong Kong–based art adviser Patti Wong.

The intimate, warm still-life features piles of books in a room widely believed to be in his brother Theo’s apartment, where he lived at the time. Theo submitted Piles de romans to the Salon des Indépendants art exhibition in 1888, alongside two landscapes of Montmartre by the artist.

The result nearly doubled the previous auction record for a painting from the artist’s Paris period during the late 1880s. That was previously held by Corner of a Garden with Butterflies (1887), which sold for $33.2 million in 2024 at Christie’s.

Mark Rothko, No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), 1958

Sold for $62,160,000

Christie’s

Mark Rothko’s No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) (1958) sold in November for $62.16 million at Christie’s, making it the top lot sold by the auction house this year. The canvas captures a brief phase in Rothko’s career marked by luminous color and spiritual intensity before his palette turned darker and more austere—a period that began with his famed Seagram Murals later that year.

No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) is structured around two stacked fields of red, pink, peach, and yellow, loosely contained by an intensified outer border. The work was part of a sale from the collection of Patricia G. Ross Weis and Robert F. Weis.

Frida Kahlo, El sueño (La cama), 1940

Sold for $54,660,000

Sotheby’s

Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) (1940) reached $54.66 million at Sotheby’s in November, becoming the most expensive work sold at auction by a woman artist. The work was consigned to the auction house from the estate of Selma Ertegun and featured in Sotheby’s Exquisite Corpus Surrealism evening auction. The sale featured works by artists including Dorothea Tanning and Kay Sage, and it realized a total of $98.1 million.

This self-portrait depicts the artist lying in bed, entwined with vines and suspended in the sky. Hovering above her is a monumental skeletal figure, wired with dynamite and clutching a bouquet. The image’s charged symbolism reflects a period of acute personal crisis. One year before the painting’s completion, her former lover Leon Trotsky was assassinated; at the same time, she was navigating a tumultuous divorce from her husband, Diego Rivera.

This work will travel to several institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Modern in London. The previous auction record for a work by a woman artist was for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932), which fetched $44.41 million at Sotheby’s in 2014. Kahlo’s previous auction record was held by Diego y yo (1949), which sold for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s in 2021.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Crowns (Peso Neto), 1981

Sold for $48,335,000

Sotheby’s

Featured in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 solo exhibition at Annina Nosei Gallery in New York, Crowns (Peso Neto) sold for $48.34 million at Sotheby’s on November 18th. Painted on Christmas Day in 1981, the work brings together many of Basquiat’s defining motifs at a moment when his career was accelerating.

Four heads encircle the canvas, three crowned and one ringed with thorns, amid a flurry of numbers, arrows, and inscriptions. The phrase peso neto, which translates to “net weight,” underscores the painting’s meditation on ambition and commodification, with the crown both a burden and a symbol of ascent.

After its debut, the work appeared at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, in 1982. The painting passed through the hands of a London-based collector before entering the collection of Thomas Worrell, an important early supporter of Basquiat. It was later acquired by José Mugrabi in 2003 before being sold privately in 2019.

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue, 1922

Sold for $47,560,000

Christie’s

Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue (1922) sold for $47.56 million, making it the leading lot of the May auctions at Christie’s.

This work—dominated by a large red square set against a grid of smaller colored rectangles—is a canonical example of Mondrian’s mature period. The work is central to the early 20th-century De Stijl movement, which sought a universal visual language through strict geometry, primary colors, and radical abstraction. Acquired directly from Mondrian by the Dutch poet Anthony Kok, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue was later sold to French geologist Henri-Georges Doll. It remains the last of four Mondrian paintings once owned by Kok that are held in private hands.

Mondrian’s current auction record is held by Composition No. II (1930), which sold at Sotheby’s in 2022 for $51 million.

Pablo Picasso, La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse), 1932

Sold for $45,485,000

Christie’s

Pablo Picasso’s portrait of his lover and muse Marie-Thérèse Walter, La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse) (1932), sold for $45.5 million at Christie’s on November 17th. The work was painted during the summer at Picasso’s château in Boisgeloup shortly after his landmark Paris retrospective, when Marie-Thérèse became the central figure in his art. Shown absorbed in reading, she is rendered with sculptural volume, soft pastel planes, and visible charcoal lines that convey intimacy and ease.

The painting formed part of the Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weiss collection sale and was acquired by the collectors in 1985 from Acquavella Galleries.

Claude Monet, Nymphéas, 1907

Sold for $45,485,000

Christie’s

Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (1907), one of the standout lots from Christie’s November 20th-century evening sale, fetched $45.48 million.

The light-dappled painting of lily pads was consigned to auction by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art. The museum recently announced it would close its Sakura City, Japan, location in March 2026 and will open a smaller Tokyo location in 2030.

Nymphéas is part of Monet’s revered “Water Lilies” series, which comprises some 250 paintings. Nymphéas focuses on the pond in the French Impressionist’s Giverny garden. Last year, the artist’s Nymphéas (1914–17) sold for $65.5 million at Sotheby’s in New York—among the top 10 results of 2024. Monet’s auction record was made in 2019 for Meules (1890), which sold at Sotheby’s for $110.74 million.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/VzsWFQA