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Welcome back to Wall Power’s Inner Circle. I’m Marion
Maneker.
It’s been a big season, and I’ve got the numbers to prove it. Tonight, I’ll go through the usual auction-season analysis to get a better understanding of the art market’s strong and somewhat surprising recovery this spring. As you may have already heard me say, these May sales doubled in value from last year, with the jump entirely attributable to the top 27 lots sold for $20 million or more. And yet, if we go deeper into the data provided by our friends at ARTDAI, there
are more interesting tales to tell.
Up top, a painting attributed to a follower of Hieronymus Bosch opened Sotheby’s midseason Old Masters sale in New York, selling for more than a dozen times the estimate, and the folks at Christie’s have shared some data on bidders with me that I will now pass on to you.
Also mentioned in this issue: David Pollack, Marian Goodman, Alberto Giacometti, Si
Newhouse Jr., Jackson Pollock, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Jasper Johns, Edvard Eriksen, Harald Slott-Møller, El Lissitzky, Bridget Tichenor, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Margo Hoff,
Deborah Butterfield, Robert Henri, and more.
Let’s get to it…
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- Bosch, Bosch, Bosch: There are only around 25 works of art attributed to Hieronymus Bosch himself. But as Sotheby’s notes in its catalogue essay for the Bosch-like painting Hell, there are other works, dated to the first half of the 16th century, that are “understood not as direct copies of a lost Bosch original, but rather as compilations of...
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Lured by the optimistic tailwinds from last fall’s Lauder auction, high-value
supply came back to the art market in May, with sales totaling $2.5 billion. But the comeback may not be quite as roaring as it appears: Unimpressive hammer ratios reveal buyers’ willingness to pay, but not more than they have to.
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New York’s apex sales event, the May auction cycle, has been fascinating to behold. Over
the past year, the art market has come roaring back—at least in terms of the raw numbers. That caveat isn’t meant to suggest that there’s some hidden weakness in the market. Quite the opposite. As I’ve been telling you for some time, the bottom of the art market has gone from strength to strength, but the missing element—the sex appeal, if you will—has been the big money at the top. And that’s returned in a very big way this season.
In May 2025, eight works were offered with estimates of
$20 million or more. Only six of them sold, accounting for $214 million out of a $1.25 billion total for the entire sales cycle. One of the signal failures of that season was an Alberto Giacometti bust, priced at $70 million, that could not generate any interest from bidders. It went back to its consignor unsold, and the public perception was...
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