Lessons from the May Auction Sales

The New York May auctions generated the strongest aggregate evening-sale totals since the art market correction that began in late 2022. Across Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips, the three houses produced roughly $2.15 billion with fees during the spring season’s major evening auctions—a 70% increase compared to last year. Indeed, by comparison, equivalent evening sales in May 2024 had generated approximately $937 million according to ArtTactic, while May 2025 brought roughly $1.26 billion. This time around, Christie’s contributed about $1.29 billion to the total across its evening sales on 18 and 20 May, while Sotheby’s generated about $737 million across its major Modern and Contemporary evening auctions, and Phillips approximately $115.2 million.

Yet the comparison with 2024 and 2025 alone risks overstating the scale of the rebound. The New York spring seasons of 2024 and 2025 had indeed been exceptionally weak. According to The Art Newspaper, the combined low estimates for the May 2025 evening auctions, for instance, had fallen to roughly $1.1 billion — the lowest level since 2010. By contrast, the May 2026 sales entered the season carrying combined expectations between roughly $1.8 billion and $2.6 billion. In other words, before bidding even began, the houses had already radically increased both the quantity and quality of material entering the market.

Mark Rothko's No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) from 1964, sold for $98,385,000

This indicates that one of the main factors of the current rebound at auctions was the return of supply—more so than bidding intensity itself. Throughout late 2023 and much of 2024, one of the market’s central problems was the absence of major consignments. Owners of eight and nine-figure works increasingly preferred to wait rather than expose important material publicly in unstable market conditions. This May, however, the market suddenly saw the reappearance of exceptionally fresh and institutionally validated works: Pollocks from the S.I. Newhouse collection, a major Rothko from Agnes Gund, postwar holdings from Robert Mnuchin, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin works from Henry McNeil Jr.’s collection, Richter paintings from Marian Goodman’s estate... The list goes on.

Franz Kline's Harleman (1960) in Robert Mnuchin's living room

Christie’s thus garnered more than $1.1 billion in a single evening, through the combination of the S.I. Newhouse sale and the 20th Century Evening Sale. And a very substantial portion of that result came from one source alone: the Newhouse collection, which generated $630.8 million and became the fourth most valuable single-owner collection ever sold during an evening auction—after Paul Allen’s collection at Christie’s in 2022 ($1.62 billion), the Macklowe Collection at Sotheby’s in 2022 ($922.2 million) and the Rockefeller Collection at Christie’s in 2018 ($835.1 million). The comparison with the equivalent Christie’s collection from the previous year is revealing. In May 2025, the Leonard & Louise Riggio collection generated approximately $272 million. The Newhouse collection therefore produced well over double the equivalent total achieved by Christie’s only one year earlier. The broader Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale also rebounded sharply, reaching approximately $490.3 million with fees against roughly $217 million for its equivalent sale in May 2025.

Picasso's Arlequin (Buste) from 1909, sold for $42.64 million

Similarly, the impressive year-over-year growth of Sotheby’s results is largely bound up with the quality of its consignments. Its Modern Evening Auction—ripe with incredible works by Picasso, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Matisse and Van Gogh—reached approximately $303.9 million, up around 63% from the equivalent sale one year earlier ($186.4 million). As for the house’s Robert Mnuchin collection—comprising five 8-figure works by Franz Kline, Rohtko and De Kooning—and The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction, they generated together roughly $433.1 million against around $127.1 million for The Now Evening Auction alone in May 2025 (as no major collection accompanied it last year). Lastly, Phillips experienced perhaps the sharpest proportional rebound of all, garnering $115.2 million with fees against around $52 million in May 2025 according to Artnet. Once more, the bulk of those results came from works by the likes of Claude Monet, Paul Signac, Joan Mitchell, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Gerhard Richter, Mark Bradford, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol, Alberto Giacometti, Jackson Pollock...

Hence, if the overall totals appear to indicate a market that has broadly recovered at first glance, the reality is much more nuanced. The strongest performances of the season overwhelmingly concentrated around museum-grade postwar and modern works carrying exceptional provenance: Pollock, Rothko, Newman, Brancusi, de Kooning, Judd… Ultra-contemporary art, by contrast, remained comparatively subdued throughout the week despite having been one of the primary engines of the 2021–2022 boom on the art market.

Roy Lichtenstein's Voodoo Lily (1961)

On top of that, individual lot performances were not always those that one would associate with a booming market. The Newhouse sale at Christie’s provides perhaps the clearest example. While the auction achieved a remarkable $630.8 million total and sold every lot offered, Artnet noted that 7 of the 16 lots actually hammered below their low estimate. Jasper Johns’s Figure 2, for instance, was estimated at $10–15 million and was sold for at $8.8 million including fees... Roy Lichtenstein’s Voodoo Lily sold to guarantor: estimated $6–8 million, it sold for $5.6 million after fees. Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Large Red Plane hammered below estimate before reaching approximately $39.7 million with fees. The same phenomenon repeated itself throughout the week. At Sotheby’s, Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds from the Robert Mnuchin collection was estimated at $70–100 million and sold for about $85.8 million with fees, meaning the work cleared its low estimate but did not dramatically exceed expectations. Sotheby’s opening night totalled $433 million, but the sale was also heavily structured through guarantees. Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale displayed a similar dynamic. It reached $490.3 million with fees, selling 96% by lot and 99% by value according to Christie’s own release. Artnet’s breakdown put the hammer total at roughly $409 million against an adjusted low estimate of around $361 million. That is a solid result, but far from a bidding frenzy. More importantly, Artnet reported that 30 lots were guaranteed, with guaranteed low estimates representing $303.75 million, or 77.7% of the sale’s total low estimate.

So, this is probably the main takeaway for this art market season: the May auctions did not reveal a market suddenly willing to pay dramatically higher prices for equivalent material. They showed a market where liquidity came back for very specific works, under very specific conditions: exceptional provenance, relatively disciplined estimates, and a large amount of financial engineering before the sale.

In that regard, the comparison with 2021–2022 is enlightening. The market peak was not merely defined by large totals, but by aggressive estimates, speculative contemporary bidding, rapid resale cycles and abundant liquidity. The current rebound is different. The same level of speculative breadth has not returned. Instead, the market appears to have rotated toward works that collectors understand as safer: postwar abstraction, modern masters, historically validated Minimalism, and trophy-level examples with long provenance. As we have touched on in previous articles of ours, the broader macroeconomic context helps explain that rotation. The 2021–2022 boom took place under a very different monetary regime. The Federal Reserve’s benchmark rate was still near zero at the start of 2022. Between March 2022 and July 2023, the Fed lifted the target range from 0.2% to 5.12%, one of the fastest tightening cycles in decades. This increased the opportunity cost of holding illiquid assets and made speculative art much harder to justify than during the zero-rate years.

Energy prices added another layer to the tightening cycle. Brent crude traded around the $80 per barrel at the beginning of 2022 and briefly moved above $120 per barrel after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That energy shock fed into inflation, which reached 9.1% year-over-year in the United States in June 2022, the highest CPI reading since the early 1980s. And for the last two years, this concern has not been limited to Ukraine: tensions surrounding Iran and the Strait of Hormuz periodically resurfaced since 2024, before escalating dramatically in 2026, creating a recurring source of energy-market risk. The Strait matters because, as the U.S. Energy Information Administration describes it, it is the world’s most important oil chokepoint, with roughly one fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption passing through it. The problem is that, even when disruptions do not materialize, the possibility of escalation is enough to affect inflation expectations and risk appetite. Energy shocks can thus quickly affect liquidity, confidence and discretionary high-end purchases.

Smoke rising from an oil facility in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates on March 14

That mechanism is not new. The Gulf War of 1990–1991 offers a useful historical analogue: oil prices surged rapidly during the crisis, while Christie’s seasonal sales fell from $2.4 billion to $1.22 billion (-49%) and Sotheby’s from $3.2 billion to $1.3 billion (-59%). Indeed, because of the surge in oil prices, many players in the general economy anticipated the inflationary pressures—as well as shrinking corporate margins—that would ensue and became quite risk-averse. In an article titled Art: The Great Massacre of 1990, Time Magazine recounted the violent impact of the oil crisis on the most speculative segment of 1980’s contemporary art, directly linking it to the disappearance of Japanese bidders following the dramatic descent of the Nikkei stock index. Even more interesting, though, is what happened in the following years. Indeed, as policymakers anticipated inflation and a recession, the FED started to decrease its target interest rate: from about 8% in 1990, it ended up at the 5—6% mark in 1991, then 3—4% in 1992. What paradoxically followed over the course of just a few years was an evolution of financial conditions (lower borrowing costs), a gradual return of wealth and purchasing appetite. This had positive, albeit delayed, consequences for the art market: if monetary dynamics did not immediately “save” the market, which was heavily impacted by the crisis at first (in 1990–91, despite monetary easing, auction revenues remained severely depressed throughout the season), they created the conditions that later allowed liquidity and buyers to progressively return. By the mid-1990s, the auction market had progressively stabilized around historically validated segments such as Impressionist and Modern art, even though many of the speculative dynamics associated with the late-1980s boom never fully returned.

What we are witnessing today might not be all that different. After nearly three years of monetary tightening, slowing economic activity and geopolitical instability, several of the macroeconomic conditions that had weighed on discretionary spending and financial liquidity began to improve toward the end of 2025. Inflation progressively decelerated in most Western economies, expectations surrounding future interest-rate cuts became increasingly widespread, and broader financial markets recovered significantly from their 2022–2023 lows. As in the early 1990s, this did not immediately translate into a broad-based resurgence of the art market. But it progressively recreated the financial conditions under which liquidity could begin returning—first and foremost at the very top end of the market.

The global art market returned to growth in 2025, with Art Basel & UBS estimating total sales at $59.6 billion, up 4% year-over-year after two years of decline. But the recovery was not evenly distributed: public auction sales rose 9% to $20.7 billion, while dealer sales rose only 2% to $34.8 billion... and the high end did much better than the rest. Art Basel’s own summary notes that in the U.S., sales of fine art works at auction above $10 million rose by nearly 40% in 2025. That is almost exactly the dynamic visible in New York this May: the market is not broadly euphoric, but the best material is finding liquidity again.

Frieze NYC 2026

The primary market tells a similar story. At Frieze New York, reported sales included a Georg Baselitz at around $1.6 million, an Alex Katz at around $600,000 and a Joan Snyder at around $150,000 at Thaddaeus Ropac. These are not weak results, but they point toward established artists and carefully priced works, not a return of broad speculative appetite across younger contemporary names. TEFAF New York showed the same high-end bias. Observer reported strong attendance and high-value sales, including a Lucio Fontana at around $2.3 million. But again, the strongest reported activity centred on historically validated modern, postwar and design material rather than speculative primary-market contemporary art.

All in all, these May auctions confirm that, in today’s art market, sellers of major works are willing to return, buyers are willing to compete for the best material, and auction houses can still manufacture strong sale environments through guarantees and disciplined estimates. But the recovery is concentrated, heavily structured, and largely confined to the upper end. These sales therefore mostly mark the return of liquidity for the very best material—fresh works with strong provenance from canonical artists, with disciplined estimates and high levels of pre-sale financial protection. Whether that liquidity eventually moves down into the middle market remains the real question.