Take a look at the top ten auction results of 2025 and you’d be forgiven for thinking the art market had been magically transported back to the halcyon post-pandemic years. Cumulatively, those lots totaled a robust $757 million—the highest figure since 2022’s $1.1 billion, and well above 2024’s $512.6 million and 2023’s $660 million.
Much of the credit belongs to the specialists at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips. After a first half of 2025 that looked nearly as dreary as 2024—and with sentiment further dampened by the closure of a half dozen or more major galleries—the auction houses pounded the pavement for A-plus material capable of drawing wary collectors back into the market. By November, all three houses had secured standout consignments, led by Sotheby’s sale of works from the collection of Leonard Lauder and Christie’s sale of works from the collection of Robert and Patricia Ross Weiss. Coupled with aggressive estimates and third-party guarantees, the marquee November sales helped shift the market narrative this fall, bolstered by good energy and sales at Frieze London and Art Basel Paris.
Now with a successful Art Basel Miami Beach now in the rearview mirror, the art market is preparing to wind down until 2026. Before it does, ARTnews looks back at the top ten auction results of 2025 (all prices listed as inclusive of fees). Spoiler alert: all but one of the lots sold in November.
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Claude Monet, Nymphéas, 1907
Image Credit: Christie’s Images Ltd. 2025 Sold for: $45.5 million
This 1907 work was the cover lot for Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17 in New York. The work was consigned by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, one of several works the museum sold this season to alleviate tens of millions of debt that the DIC Corp. is currently carrying. While the $45.5 million achieved for the sale is nothing to scoff at, it’s worth noting that the work hammered for below its low estimate of $40 million.
“This example is a particularly colorful, beautiful and powerful example of what makes the Nympheas renowned as arguably the greatest and most triumphant series of Monet’s career,” Imogen Kerr, Christie’s cohead of the 20th-century evening sale, said in a written statement to ARTnews ahead of the sale.
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Pablo Picasso, La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse), 1932
Image Credit: Christie’s Images Ltd. 2025 Sold for: $45.5 million
Appearing in the single-owner Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weiss sale on November 17 that preceded Christie’s 20th Century evening sale, La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse) achieved a healthy $45.5 million. However, it too hammered below a $40 million estimate upon request. Picasso works are often seen as a barometer for the art market as a whole, given their long, stable track record. In addition to La Lecture, Christie’s auctioned off four other Picasso works on November 17, though none of those exceeded $5 million, let alone approaching La Lecture‘s $45.5 million.
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Piet Mondrian, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue, 1922
Image Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s Sold for: $47.6 million
This Mondrian work, sold as part of Christie’s single-owner “Leondard & Louise Riggio: Collected Works” sale on May 12, is the only result from a forgettable May sales season to hit the top ten. Buoyed by a house guarantee, the work hammered for $41 million. With the work carrying a $50 million estimate, Christie’s had likely been hoping it would reset the Dutch painter’s 2022 record of $51 million. Alas, better luck next time.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Crowns (Peso Neto), 1981
Image Credit: Sotheby’s Sold for: $48.3 million
While the headlines from Sotheby’s evening sales on November 18 were dominated by the nearly $400 million generated for three works by Gustav Klimt, there were some notable fireworks later that night. During the “Now & Contemporary Evening Auction,” Sotheby’s sold this Basquiat work—reportedly from the collection of French actor Francis Lombrail—for above its $45 million high estimate after a lengthy bidding war.
Grégoire Billault, Sotheby’s chairman of contemporary art, told ARTnews ahead of the sale that the work is from 1981—a pivotal year in Basquiat’s rise—and was painted on Christmas night, with the inscription on the back reading “December 25, 1981.” “It’s basically Basquiat crowning himself someone of importance in New York,” he said.
The painting debuted at Basquiat’s landmark solo show at Annina Nosei Gallery in March 1982, and then showed that summer at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. It was purchased from Nosei by a London-based collector, who then sold it to Thomas Worrell, whom Billault described as an important early collector of Basquiat’s work. José Mugrabi, of the famed art-collecting family, acquired Crowns (Peso Neto) in 2003 and sold it privately for an undisclosed sum to the current consignor in 2019.
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Frida Kahlo, El sueño (La cama), 1940
Image Credit: Sotheby’s Sold for: $54.7 million
Carrying a pre-sale estimate of $40 million to $60 million, this work by Kahlo was all but guaranteed to break the artist’s previous auction record of $34.9 million, set at Sotheby’s New York in 2021 for the 1949 painting Diego y yo. But after the bidding was finished on November 20, El sueño (La cama) had done one better. It reset the record for a woman artist at auction, besting the $44.4 million achieved for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 in 2014. The Kahlo work was consigned to Sotheby’s by the estate of Selma Ertegun, who built a collection of Surrealist art with her late husband Nesuhi Ertegun, a former executive of Atlantic Records.
While the work is not as well known as some of Kahlo’s other self-portraits, it is considered a key piece of her oeuvre. Art historian Whitney Chadwick discussed it in depth in her landmark 1985 book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, which centered women within a movement that had previously sidelined them. Chadwick said the work revealed Kahlo’s “identification with the Mexican belief in the indivisible unity of life and death.”
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Mark Rothko, No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), 1958
Image Credit: Christie’s Images Ltd. 2025 Sold for: $62.2 million
This striking red-and-orange painting by Rothko was sold by Christie’s during its Robert and Patricia Ross Weiss sale on November 17. It netted the top result of the evening, selling for a hammer price of $53.5 million on a $50 million estimate.
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Vincent van Gogh, Piles de romans parisiens et roses dans une verre (Romans parisiens), 1888
Image Credit: Sotheby’s Sold for: $62.7 million
Sotheby’s final night of sales during November marquee auction week kicked off with 13 works from the collection of Chicago-based collectors Cindy and Jay Pritzker. All in all, that part of the sale was a major success, totaling $109.5 million, with five works selling above estimate. The top result of the sale was this work by Vincent van Gogh, which generated a seven-minute bidding war, before adviser Patti Wong won the lot. The work nearly doubled the previous record for a painting from the artist’s Paris period. (That was set in 2024 at $33.2 million for the 1887 work Corner of a Garden with Butterflies.) The painting is thought to depict a room in the apartment of van Gogh’s brother Theo, with whom he lived for a time.
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Gustav Klimt, Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee), 1916
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s Sold for: $68.3 million
The final Klimt work to appear at Sotheby’s on November 18 as part of the single-owner Leonard A. Lauder Collection sale hammered at $61 million, well below its $70 million estimate. Still the work carried significance both for Lauder and Klimt. It was the first work by Klimt that Lauder ever purchased; it is also Klimt’s last surviving landscape, having been executed in 1916 during his final summer at Lake Attersee. The work featured in the Neue Galerie’s 150th-anniversary celebration of the artist in 2012.
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Gustav Klimt, Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow), 1908
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s Sold for: $86 million
For those that missed out on the $236.4 million Klimt portrait of Elisabeth Lederer at Sotheby’s on November 18, they got another bite at the apple three lots later. This jewel-like 1908 landscape, also offered as part of the Leonard A. Lauder single-owner sale, was painted during one of the artist’s summer retreats to Austria’s Lake Attersee. It is considered one of Klimt’s most innovative landscapes, given its square canvas and mosaic-like field of color. The $86 million achieved in November is the second highest paid for a Klimt landscape. The record for such a work remains $104.5 million, set in 2022 by Birch Forest, a painting once owned Paul Allen.
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Gustav Klimt, Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer), 1914–16
Image Credit: Sotheby’s Sold for: $236.4 million
After a fierce 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s on November 18, this painting by Klimt cemented its place in history by becoming the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, trailing only Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (ca. 1500), which sold for $450.3 million. The Klimt was the cover lot of Sotheby’s single-owner Leonard A. Lauder Collection sale, which featured 55 works valued at over $400 million.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is widely considered one of Klimt’s most intricately conceived late portraits, begun when the artist was at the height of his powers and completed after nearly three years of revisions. Commissioned by the family that served as Klimt’s most important patrons, the work survived confiscation during the Nazi era and was restituted in 1948 before entering Lauder’s collection. It marks one of only two full-length portraits by Klimt still in private hands.
And, if the rumors are true, it’s possible this work enters a museum collection soon enough: Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’s president, has been reported as the buyer of the work. Perhaps Zayed is planning on adding it to the collection of the recently opened Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi.
