This month’s blockbuster auctions in New York could bring upwards of $2.5bn – The Art Newspaper

This year’s May auctions in New York are shaping up to be a major moment for the art trade, with works cumulatively estimated at to bring between $1.8bn and $2.6bn coming up for sale at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips and Bonhams. The auction houses will be looking to build on the momentum of last November’s sales, whose results were widely seen as signs of recovery after a three-year slump—and the optimism in the field is palpable.

At Sotheby’s alone, the sales’ low pre-sale estimate of $690.4m is 70% higher than the total hammer figure from the May 2025 season, and on the high end, the auction house could bring in as much as $942.5m. And Christie’s is aiming even higher, with an expected total between $1b and $1.5b.

The two rival houses split two of the most-anticipated estates of the season, from two legendary dealers, with Christie’s landing the collection of Marian Goodman and Sotheby’s offering Robert Mnuchin’s holdings.

The expected top lot from Goodman’s collection, hitting the auction block at Rockefeller Center on 20 May, is Gerhard Richter’s Kerze (Candle), which is part of his unexpected turn from celebrated abstractions to still-life painting in the 1980s. The dealer purchased the 1982 painting before she began representing Richter in 1985 and found it so inspirational she sent him a cold letter suggesting they work together—a partnership that would go on to last 40 years. Christie’s has given the canvas an estimate of $35m to $50m.

Sotheby’s has placed a $130m total estimate on its Mnuchin lots, which are the subject of a dedicated evening sale at the Breuer Building on 14 May. The group is led by a $70m to $100m Mark Rothko painting titled Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957). Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc acquired it the year Rothko painted it and it is believed to have shaped the direction of Rothko’s famed Seagram Mural commission for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant the following year.

“So many of the best American collectors bought all their works from or with the advice of Bob Mnuchin,” Lucius Elliott, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art marquee sales in New York, tells The Art Newspaper. “And the ultimate endorsement is that these are the works he held back.”

Another important estate on offer at Sotheby’s this month is that of the Italian Surrealist Enrico Donati and his wife, Adele Donati. Among the 45 lots from his holdings is Pablo Picasso’s 1909 painting Arlequin (Buste), which will be included in the multiple-owner evening sale of Modern art on 19 May. It is a rare chance to snap up one of his major Cubist works, and could fetch up to $40m (though when it came to market 18 years ago, it failed to sell).

Christie’s is bringing to auction additional holdings from the late Condé Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse, who died back in 2017. The 16 lots from his collection will be featured in a dedicated sale on 18 May immediately preceding the firm’s multi-owner evening auction of 20th-century art. The group is estimated to collectively bring in as much as $450m and is led by a pair of $100m works: the drip painting Number 7A (1948) by Jackson Pollock, and Danaïde (around 1913), a bronze and gold leaf sculpture of a stylised head by Constantin Brancusi. (When Newhouse bought it, in 2002, it set a world record for a sculpture at auction of $18.1m.)

In its evening sale of 20th-century art on 18 May, Christie’s will also offer a trio of works that belonged to the late arts patron Agnes Gund, by Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Joseph Cornell, which could together bring in $123m. And from the collection of the late philanthropist Marilyn Arison, an impressive selection of Impressionist works will likely be led by Edouard Manet’s floral still life Pivoines dans une Bouteille (1864). It is the last in a series of six by the artist in private hands, and it is estimated at $7m to $10m.

Sotheby’s, meanwhile, is expecting major results from works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Willem de Kooning during it’s the Now & Contemporary evening sale on 14 May. Basquiat’s Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) is expected to bring $45m and and De Kooning’s Untitled III is estimated at $25m to $35m. There is also the potential for a new record for a Vincent van Gogh work on paper, when the auction house offers an impressively large and chromatic watercolour, La Moisson en Provence (1888), estimated at $25m to $35m, during its evening sale of Modern art on 19 May. (A work from the same series achieved $35.8m, the current auction record for his works on paper, at Christie’s in 2021.)

And from the collection of the German Swiss socialite and playboy Gunter Sachs, Sotheby’s will offer Andy Warhol’s 1974 portrait of Sachs’s wife, the titular Brigitte Bardot. Based on a Richard Avedon photograph, it is estimated at $14m to $18m. (A different version of this work sold in a live single-lot auction conducted by Loïc Gouzer’s Fair Warning platform for $16.7m last November.)

Collectors will also get a chance to bring home some of Warhol’s women at Phillips on 19 May, where the 1964 silkscreen Sixteen Jackies leads the evening sale with a $15m to $20m estimate. And Jacqueline Kennedy is joined there by Warhol’s 4 Colored Marilyns (Reversal Series), depicting Marilyn Monroe in blue and green on a black background. The work, which has never come to auction before, could make $4m to $6m.

Other highlights at Phillips include a rich collection of Danish art amassed by the late US ambassador John L. Loeb Jr, and a singular work on canvas by Lee Bontecou that has not been on public view in two decades. The untitled piece, depicting a fragmented wave-like form, could bring in between $1.2m and $1.8m.

“While she is rightly celebrated for her revolutionary steel relief sculptures, this expansive work occupies a category entirely its own. There is nothing else quite like it in her entire body of work,” Robert Manley, Phillips’s chairman of Modern and contemporary art, said in a statement, calling it “a rare opportunity for our collecting community to encounter Bontecou at her most ambitious and visionary”.

And as prices for longer-overlooked mid-century women abstract artists continue to tick up, it is worth keeping an eye on the result at Phillips for Fortune, a colourful 1960 work by the second-generation New York School painter Pat Passlof. The estimate is between $300,000 and $500,000, but her work has already achieved a new secondary-market record this year, with a $537,600 result (including fees) at Sotheby’s New York in February. In total, Phillips is expecting to bring in between $108.7m and $157m from its New York sales this month.

Rounding out the May auctions is Bonhams, which is expecting a comparatively modest $30m in sales as it inaugurates its new flagship at 111 West 57th Street. The predicted top lot of its 20 May evening sale is a monumental Yoshitomo Nara painting, …Words Mean Nothing at All (2012), with an estimate of $4m to $6m.

The auction house is also bringing 21 mostly never-before-seen Pierre-Auguste Renoir works to the block. The great French Impressionist personally gifted the works to his longtime model and family nanny Gabrielle Renard, and they have remained in her family ever since. The most anticipated painting of the group, the 1887 floral still life titled Fleurs, is estimated at $500,000 to $700,000.