<\/p>\n
\n\tThe two biggest auction houses recently released their 2025 numbers, showing a 17 percent sales jump<\/a> at Sotheby\u2019s and a nearly 7 percent rise<\/a> at Christie\u2019s. Now, a year-end report from art market research and analysis company ArtTactic delves into the details of the art sales from all the major auction houses.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe auction market rebounded to $4.55 billion, up some 11.1 percent from 2024, ArtTactic finds. Among Old Masters, Impressionist and modern art, the strongest historical categories, year-on-year growth was 42.3 percent. Soft markets are often met with a \u201cflight to quality,\u201d to time-tested material, and this report seems to indicate 2025 was no exception, as contemporary and post-war art lagged behind.<\/p>\n \n\tDriving that recovery were a number of historic single-owner sales, including the estates of Leonard Lauder, Cindy and Jay Pritzker, and Pauline Karpidas. Prominent estates sold for an impressive $884.9 million in total, accounting for a remarkable 32.9 percent of auction sales in the year\u2019s second half.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe report also heralds improvement in the \u201ctrophy\u201d market, denoting works selling for north of $10 million, which totaled $1.48 billion, a 19.4 percent increase from 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe greatest increase came in the Impressionist art category, which lagged for a couple of years behind the astronomical high of 2022, when Paul G. Allen\u2019s collection came to market, but it climbed this year by a dramatic 80.4 percent over 2024 to $1.04 billion, driven largely by three Gustav Klimt canvases from the Lauder collection, which were the most expensive works that sold all year. The value of artworks carrying a guarantee in the category doubled year over year, largely through fully guaranteed single-owner collections.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe market for modern art grew by some 19.4 percent year over year, driven partly by a 19 percent increase in the number of trophy lots sold in the category, by artists like Alexander Calder (up 108.9 percent), Pablo Picasso (up 23.8 percent), and Mark Rothko (up 122.2 percent). Confidence was reflected in a spike in guarantees for modern works coming to auction, with levels rising by 51 percent year over year, ending up in $855.9 million guaranteed by hammer value, up from $566.7 million in 2024.<\/p>\n \n\tOld Masters, a sector plagued in recent years by slim supply, climbed a rousing 68.8 percent year over year to $282.5 million. London accounted for 56 precent of global sales in the category, but New York made a strong showing with the historic sale of the Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders collection.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe year saw a historic performance by the women of the Surrealist movement, with Frida Kahlo setting a record for a work by any female artist with her El sue\u00f1o (La cama)<\/em> (1940), which sold for $47 million at Sotheby\u2019s New York in November. Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Remedios Varo and others also sold well.<\/p>\n \n\tContemporary art, meanwhile, softened, dropping by 14.4 percent over the year, from $1.31 billion to $1.12 billion. Younger contemporary artists fared even worse, with sales dropping 39.1 percent. The fall in value came along with a contraction in volume: the number of works sold dropped 24.7 percent year-on-year. Average price dropped by 17.7 percent. All the same, more young artists (861) appeared at auction than the average (656) over the last decade.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tA relatively soft performance in the post-war category, which declined 17.7 percent, was accounted for with contractions in the sales totals for market-defining artists like Andy Warhol, an auction stalwart whose market dropped by a remarkable 41.7 percent. Sales by his contemporary and fellow market-maker Yayoi Kusama plummeted by some 73 percent. Strong Sotheby\u2019s sales from the estate of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein drove his auction total for the year to $127.8 million, double those of Warhol\u2019s, which were $61.9 million. That result made him the top-selling post-war artist by total sales value.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The two biggest auction houses recently released their 2025 numbers, showing a 17 percent sales jump at Sotheby\u2019s and a nearly 7 percent rise at Christie\u2019s. Now, a year-end report from art market research and analysis company ArtTactic delves into the details of the art sales from all the major auction houses.\u00a0 The auction market […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37909,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-art"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 18:24:41","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}