Art Market
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, Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer), 1914. Courtesy of 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
Gustav Klimt, Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow), 1908. Courtesy of 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
Gustav Klimt, Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee), 1916. Courtesy of 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, Piles de romans parisiens et roses dans une verre (Romans parisiens), 1887. Courtesy of 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. Courtesy of 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. Courtesy of 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.
Sold for $48,335,000
Sotheby’s
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Crowns (Peso Neto), 1981. Courtesy of 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, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue, 1922. Courtesy of 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. Courtesy of 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.
Sold for $45,485,000
Christie’s
Claude Monet, Nymphéas, 1907. Courtesy of 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.
