In 2024, the art auction market showed signs of recovery but fell well short of the highs reached in 2022, or even the lower totals from last year.
The cumulative value of the top ten auction lots sold in 2024 was $512.6 million. That was a 22.3 percent decline from 2023’s total of $660 million and a stark 53 percent drop from 2022’s total of $1.1 billion. Meanwhile, public sales across Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips for Old Masters, modern, post-war, and contemporary art categories totaled $4.1 billion in 2024, according to a recent report by London-based analytics firm ArtTactic. This figure marked a 29 percent decline from 2023 and an even steeper 47.9 percent drop compared to 2022.
2024’s most expensive work sold at auction, René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1954), achieved $121.1 million, setting a new record for the artist, after spirited bidding at Christie’s 20th century evening sale in New York in November. The value, however, was much lower than the $195 million paid for Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) just two years earlier. Meanwhile, the 10th most expensive work of 2024, Vincent van Gogh’s Les canots amarrés (1887), sold for $32.2 million, far lower the $79.8 million benchmark set by Magritte’s L’empire des lumières in March 2022, when it was the tenth most expensive work of that year.
Pablo Picasso’s works, often a gauge for the market, saw a drop in 2024. The top 10 Picasso lots totaled $114.6 million this year, down from $344.4 million in 2023, $274.8 million in 2022, and $340.7 million in 2021. This marks the first time in three years that Picasso’s top ten works have fallen below a cumulative value of $200 million. The top 20 Picasso works, meanwhile, cumulatively fetched $128.4 million at auction. That figure is a steep drop from the $690 million equivalent in 2023. The year’s highest Picasso sale, La Statuaire (1925), fetched $24.8 million in November, an 82 percent decline from the $139 million paid for Femme à la montre (1932) in 2023.
However, one should be cautious to draw too much from such figures. In just the last four years, the highest value Basquiat work sold has fluctuated greatly, jumping from $15 million in 2020 to $93 million in 2021 before dropping to $85 million in 2022 and $67 million in 2023. This year’s top work sold for $46 milllion. Meanwhile, Magritte may have had the top work sold this year at $121.1 million, but his top work sold has fluctuated year to year, from $24.6 million in 2020 to $17.2 million in 2021 to $79.4 million in 2022 to $42.3 million in 2023.
Those valuations aren’t representative of a shift in the market of either artist, as ArtTactic’s report suggests. Rather, they represent a normal range of values for blue-chip 20th century artists, with the high watermarks more representative of the material that hit the block that year.
(Methodology: The above report relies on art sales data provided by market analysis publishers Artnet and ArtTactic.)
