The Art Market Check by Melanie Gerlis

The outcomes of the November megawatt evening auctions in New York were even more important this year than usual. Following a gloomy couple of years in the art market, there had been signs of a gentle turnaround during the October seasons in London and Paris and pressure was on New York to determine whether this marked a genuine gear change or was a short-lived bounce of enthusiasm.

In the event, five evening sales—which fielded items that ranged from a Triceratops skeleton to a solid gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan—came up trumps, making a total USD 1.9bn, including fees, nearly doubling the equivalent total in 2024 (USD 1.1bn).

Sotheby’s, operating for the first time out the so-called ‘Breuer Building’, had the biggest haul (USD 1bn) and stole most of the headlines. Records tumbled, notably on 18 November when Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16), sold for USD 236m, making it the priciest piece of Modern art ever to sell at auction and the second most expensive work ever after Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvador Mundi (c1500) sold for USD 450m in 2017. The painting was one of 24 works that came to auction from the estate of the cosmetics heir Leonard A. Lauder and which combined made USD 527.5m.

Later in the week, Sotheby’s scored another hit with Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama), 1940, a self-portrait of the artist asleep in a canopied bed with a smiling skeleton above her. This sold for USD 54.7m, making an artist record and the most expensive work by a female artist at auction (though this does not account for inflation).

The dinosaur skeleton, fielded by Phillips on 19 November and the first time this auction house has ventured into the growing collector area, sold for an above estimate USD 5.4m. Cattelan’s toilet—America (2016)—had its price pegged to the value of its 18-karat gold on the day and sold for USD 12.1m. It didn’t generate much excitement, selling to just one bid, but subsequent news that it was bought by US theme park and entertainment operator Ripley’s Believe It or Not! summarised the exuberant mood of the week.

“People are saying that the art market has turned a corner on the back of these sales, though I would say that a recovery has been happening since the summer,” says Matthew Newton, an Head of Art Advisory Americas with UBS Family Solutions.

He and other market observers are not yet hailing a return to boom times. While trophy works such as the Klimt seem likely to retain their allure, elsewhere a generational change of taste was evident as certain artists seemed past their peaks. At Christie’s a prime painting by Richard Diebenkorn—Ocean Park #40 (1971)—sold from the collection of the late American businesswoman Elaine Wynn for USD 17.7m, while Wynn had bought the work for USD 27.3m in 2021. A large, messy 1958 abstract by the master Robert Motherwell sold at Phillips for USD 1.2m, having been bought in 2017 for USD 2.2m.

Conversely, a taste for surrealism continues apace—the Kahlo painting came from a collection that also had better-than-expected results for artists including René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, while lesser-known practitioners are rising through the ranks. These include the German artist Hans Bellmer, whose racy 1959 painting of women in stripy stockings and high heels sold for USD 850,000 (USD 942,000 with fees) against an estimate of USD 300,000-400,000 at Sotheby’s.

While most of the season’s fireworks were reserved for older works, contemporary art records were also set, notably for female, Latin American artists. At Christie’s, a linen and gold leaf work by the Colombian Olga de Amaral—Pueblo H (2011)—sold from Wynn’s collection for USD 3.1m, more than five times its high estimate and beating the artist’s previous auction record by 150%, according to data from Heni. Dominican Republic-born Firilei Báez had her record broken twice on 19 November: first at Phillips when her Daughter of Revolutions (2014), a layered, delicately-coloured gouache out of which emerges a female figure, sold for USD 645,000, then a few hours later at Christie’s when a 2021 painting of swirling feathers sold for USD 1.1m, more than five times its high estimate.

Such taste is particularly pertinent to the Art Basel Miami Beach fair which falls just a fortnight after the New York sales season. “Prices are a psychological game. If they are up then people get excited and feel reassured to keep buying,” says Nicolas Nahab, a long-time gallerist who has recently co-launched an advisory and exhibitions company NG.

Two-thirds of the fair’s 283 gallery exhibitors operate in the Americas, reflecting the fair’s location at the crossroads of the North and South continents. Among the vast range of Latin American artists on view will be Venezuela’s kinetic art pioneers, Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez, shown in dialogue with work by the Spanish master Joan Miró, on a booth that explores the colour black (Cayón gallery).

Meanwhile, younger artists on the Latin American scene come to the fore in the fair’s Nova section, which fields 22 booths with work made in the past three years. Here, the Mexico City gallery, Pequod Co, anchors its showing around an installation of more than 80 chrome-blown glass figures—There’s a New World Coming, 2025—by the Guadalajara-born artist Renata Peterson, who recently created an immersive, pastiche chapel for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Indigenous and Latinx practitioners have proved powerful on the market, notably since the 2024 Venice Biennale ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ exhibition, organised by the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa.

The renewed focus plays to one of the strengths of the art scene in Brazil which, says Isadora Ganem, director of Mendes WoodDM in Sāo Paulo, has an “environment that continues to foster domestic production that is singular within the art world.” This is, she says, a silver-lining of the red tape of its art market, the biggest on the continent, which includes high import taxes and shipping costs, that hamper international trade. Ganem finds these have led to relatively “self-sufficient” national markets throughout Latin America and “a robust sense of cultural identity”.

For Art Basel Miami Beach, her gallery’s booth will include work by the Brazilian contemporary artists Paulo Nazareth, Sonia Gomes and Rosana Paulino—the latter will represent the country at Venice next year and has proved a powerful voice on racial and gender issues in Brazil. 

Like many countries in South America, Brazil has not been immune to the recent global slowdown. The latest Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report found “falling sales reported in the larger markets of South America, including Brazil and Mexico” in 2024.

A fair in the United States helps overcome some of the structural challenges to international trade, gallerists say, as well as being a powerfully convening marketplace at a time when it is still needed. “We are not back to every gallery popping the champagne in Miami, and we may never get back to that,” Newton says. But, he believes, “barring an economic calamity, there is a high probability that the art market accelerates from here.”

So, despite ongoing economic and political uncertainty worldwide, the second half of 2025 is looking like the point that the art market finally turned a corner. Once the dust has settled on the last major fair of the calendar year, and the numbers have been crunched, this will form the basis of the next ‘Art Market Check’.