Nine of the First Half's Ten Most Expensive Lots Sold in One Week in New York
Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips held 18 modern and contemporary evening sales between January and June 2026, worth about 2.91 billion dollars. Three-quarters of it changed hands in one week in May, and eight of the 18 sales sold every lot they offered.
On the evening of 18 May 2026, Christie's in New York sold Jackson Pollock's Number 7A, 1948 for 181,185,000 dollars. It is the highest price Pollock has made at auction.
It came from the collection of the late S.I. Newhouse, which Christie's sold as a single-owner sale that night. Those 16 lots made 630,825,000 dollars, almost four times what the three Hong Kong evening sales made together in March. The first half of the year in the big salerooms looked like that throughout: a handful of sales and a handful of works carried most of the money.
What these figures count
An evening sale is where an auction house puts the most expensive works of a season, fewer lots than a day sale and far more money per lot. This piece covers evening sales only: 18 of them at Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips in Hong Kong, London and New York.
Two definitions matter for everything below. The estimate is the price range the auction house publishes before the sale, and it excludes the buyer's premium, the fee the winning bidder pays on top. The prices the three houses publish afterwards include that fee. So a published price divided by the high estimate flatters every result. I give two multiples throughout: the published price against the high estimate, and the hammer price, the figure the gavel fell on, against the same number. The houses do not publish hammer prices, so I worked each one back from the published price using the fee rates in force on the day of the sale.
Where the money went
Seventy-four percent of the half-year's evening sale money changed hands in New York between 14 and 20 May. Hong Kong in March took 6 percent, London in March 16 and London in June 5.
By house, Christie's took about 1.63 billion dollars of the evening total, 56 percent, Sotheby's about 1.12 billion, 38 percent, and Phillips about 155 million, 5 percent. Across every category, not just evening sales, Sotheby's reported 3.4 billion dollars of auction sales for the half, up 59 percent, and Phillips 507 million, up 60 percent. Christie's figure of 3.5 billion, up 71 percent, comes from press reports, because I could not find the house's own release.
Sotheby's hides its prices behind a login on its lot pages, so its individual results and its March London and May New York totals come from Sotheby's own articles and from ARTnews, The Art Newspaper, HENI and The Value. Those reports round their figures, which is why they carry "about" here, and it means the season and house totals above, which I added up from them, are close rather than exact.
Three of the eight New York sales were single-owner sales, one person's collection sold as a single event: Newhouse and the Henry McNeil collection at Christie's, and Robert Mnuchin's at Sotheby's. The Pollock, the Brancusi and the Mnuchin Rothko, first, second and fourth in the table below, all came out of them. A named collection lifts prices on its own, so these results say more about those collections than about the market for the artists.
The ten most expensive lots
| Artist | Work | House | Price | Against high estimate | At hammer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jackson Pollock | Number 7A, 1948 | Christie's New York | $181,185,000 | Estimate on request | |
| Constantin Brancusi | Danaïde | Christie's New York | $107,585,000 | Estimate on request | |
| Mark Rothko | No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) | Christie's New York | $98,385,000 | Estimate on request | |
| Mark Rothko | Brown and Blacks in Reds | Sotheby's New York | $85,780,000 | 0.86x | about 0.74x |
| Claude Monet | Nymphéas | Sotheby's London | $55,196,377 | 1.02x | about 0.88x |
| Joan Miró | Portrait de Madame K. | Christie's New York | $53,535,000 | 1.53x | about 1.31x |
| Jean-Michel Basquiat | Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) | Sotheby's New York | about $52.7M | Estimate on request | |
| Henri Matisse | La Chaise lorraine | Sotheby's New York | about $48.4M | Estimate on request | |
| Roy Lichtenstein | Anxious Girl | Christie's New York | $46,060,000 | 0.77x | about 0.66x |
| Cy Twombly | Untitled | Christie's New York | $45,485,000 | 0.76x | about 0.65x |
Every lot but the Monet sold in New York in May. The Pollock, the Brancusi and the Rothko No. 15 are auction records for their artists.
Half of the ten had no published estimate. Estimate on request means the house gives the figure privately to anyone who asks, and it is common at the top of a sale, so whether those five did better or worse than expected cannot be read from public records. Of the five with a published estimate, only the Miró cleared the top of its range. At hammer the Monet sat inside its estimate, and the Lichtenstein and the Twombly both stopped a little below their low estimate of 40 million dollars. The most expensive end of the market did not get bid up.
What sits behind a clean sweep
A sale that sells every lot it offers is called a white glove sale. Eight of the 18 were white glove: Christie's and Sotheby's in Hong Kong, Sotheby's in London in March, Christie's surrealist sale in London the next night, the Newhouse, McNeil and Mnuchin collections in New York, and Phillips in New York.
That looks like a market with more buyers than lots. Two things were done before the auctioneer started, and both push the rate up.
The first is withdrawal. ARTnews reported that Sotheby's in Hong Kong withdrew two works by Zeng Fanzhi and one by Yayoi Kusama before the sale, which is how it kept its 100 percent. Sotheby's in London announced 54 lots in March, withdrew one, and sold the other 53. A lot that is pulled because it looks unlikely to sell does not count against the sale.
The second is the guarantee. According to ARTnews, all 16 Newhouse lots carried an irrevocable bid, a commitment made before the sale by an outside party to buy at an agreed price. A lot with one of those cannot go unsold. The Art Newspaper reported that Lucio Fontana's Concetto spaziale at Sotheby's London sold at its low estimate to its guarantor.
A white glove often means the house only put up what it already knew would sell. It says less about demand than the headline suggests.
Above the estimate, and stuck at the bottom
These are drawn from the top lots of each sale, not from every lot, so they cannot be turned into a share of the market.
| Artist | Work | Sale | Against high estimate | At hammer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jacques Lipchitz | Jeune fille à la tresse | Christie's London, March | 2.86x | about 2.29x |
| Liu Dan | Dictionary | Phillips Hong Kong, March | 2.56x | about 2.00x |
| Dorothea Tanning | Children's Games | Christie's London, March | 2.34x | about 1.90x |
| Willem de Kooning | Untitled (1970) | Sotheby's New York, May | 1.80x | about 1.47x |
| Henry Moore | King and Queen | Christie's London, March | 1.76x | about 1.50x |
| Gerhard Richter | Abstraktes Bild (1995) | Christie's New York, May | 1.75x | about 1.42x |
| Mark Rothko | No. 10 | Sotheby's Hong Kong, March | 1.67x | about 1.35x |
All seven still clear the top of their range at hammer, but the multiple drops by between 0.3 and 0.6 once the fee comes out. Henry Moore's King and Queen made 35,675,872 dollars, his auction record and the top price of the London March season. Liu Dan and Dorothea Tanning also set new records for their work.
At the other end, three lots barely reached the bottom of their range.
Gerhard Richter's Kerze sold at Christie's New York for 35,135,000 dollars, just 135,000 above its low estimate of 35 million. That figure includes the fee. Worked back, the hammer was about 30 million, some 5 million below the low estimate.
The Value reported that Wassily Kandinsky's Le rond rouge at Christie's London sold on a single bid at its low estimate. Working back from the published price gives a hammer of exactly that low estimate.
Andy Warhol's Sixteen Jackies at Phillips New York hammered at 13.5 million dollars, under its low estimate of 15 million.
Three names to look up
Liu Dan was born in Nanjing in 1953 and moved to Hawaii in 1981, where he studied Western art. He paints in ink. At the Phillips Hong Kong evening sale in March, Dictionary (2011) sold for 1,467,233 dollars, his auction record. The Value reported that the previous record, set in 2017, was 1,279,126 dollars.
Andrew Cranston is a Scottish painter born in 1969. At Phillips London in June, Meditation in a tenement (2023) sold for 113,548 dollars, about a third above his previous auction record.
Lee Bontecou set her auction record at Phillips New York in May, at 4,227,000 dollars. ARTnews noted that women artists did well in that sale.
Scope: the 18 modern and contemporary evening sales held by Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips from January to June 2026. Hong Kong, March: 3. London, March: 5, three of them Christie's. New York, May: 8. London, June: 2, the Phillips sale being a combined evening and afternoon sale. Day and online sales are excluded, and so is Christie's live Zabludowicz collection sale of 25 June, which was not billed as an evening sale. Prices are as published by the houses and include buyer's premium; sterling converted at 1.354 dollars and Hong Kong dollars at 0.128 dollars (rates of 9 September 2026). Hammer prices were worked back at the rates in force on each sale date: Sotheby's from 13 February 2026, 28 percent to 2 million dollars (1.5 million pounds, 15 million Hong Kong dollars), 22 percent to 8 million (6 million pounds), 15 percent above; Christie's from September 2025, 27 percent to 1.5 million dollars (1 million pounds), 22 percent to 8 million (6 million pounds), 15 percent above; Phillips from 12 April 2026, 29 percent to 2 million dollars (1.5 million pounds). For Phillips Hong Kong in March, where I found no published rate card, I used the rate at which three lots from that sale all resolve to round hammer prices: 29 percent to 7.5 million Hong Kong dollars and 22 percent above. Every worked-back hammer landed on a round bidding increment. Phillips charges a lower rate to bidders who register early, and Sotheby's and Phillips report a guarantor's purchase net of the guarantor's fee, so a hammer worked back from such a lot can differ from the real one. Sources: sothebys.com, christies.com, phillips.com, Sotheby's first-half results release of 14 July 2026, Phillips' first-half results article, ARTnews, The Art Newspaper, HENI News, The Value, ArtDependence and Euronews, retrieved 14 September 2026.