Hold on tight, art lovers! The November auctions are about to unleash a tidal wave of masterpieces, and the stakes are higher than ever. We're talking about a potential $1.5 billion worth of art changing hands in a matter of days. But here's the kicker: even with all the buzz, the market is walking a tightrope, balancing excitement with a healthy dose of caution. Let's dive into the heavyweight contenders vying for your attention (and your millions!).
Lot Watch: The A-List of Artworks Ready to Rumble at the November Marquee Sales
The New York art scene is about to explode with the November marquee sales. In a world where everyone's a little more careful with their money, these auctions are still a magnet. Sure, finding those truly iconic pieces is getting harder, and buyers are pickier than ever. But when the big auction houses bring out the real showstoppers, everything else fades into the background. This year, what's really interesting is who's leading the pack (Sotheby's, by a mile!) and the incredible range of art up for grabs, from the 19th century all the way to today. We're talking Klimt, Ernst, and even a dinosaur skeleton at Phillips! It feels like the market isn't just excited, but selectively confident – and definitely gaining momentum. With over $1.5 billion worth of art on the block at Phillips, Sotheby's, and Christie's, that's a huge leap from last year, where estimates were way lower.
The catalogs are out, the previews are over. The sales start next week, so there's still time to see these amazing artworks before they vanish into private collections or museums. Who knows when you'll see them again? (Okay, maybe in a season or two.)
Let's check out the top lots next week:
Gustav Klimt, Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer, Estimated to Exceed $150 Million at Sotheby’s
Sotheby's is coming in swinging with a knockout punch: three Klimt paintings (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/leonard-lauder-sothebys-klimt-matisse-1234751922/) from the Lauder Collection. But one stands head and shoulders above the rest: Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer. This huge portrait was commissioned by Serena and August Lederer, Klimt's biggest supporters. He painted their daughter when he was at his peak, blending decoration, color, and symbolism in a way that makes it a monument to Viennese modernism, not just a portrait. And the history? It's wild! It was stolen during the war, barely escaped a fire that destroyed most of the Lederer collection, and then spent 40 years in the Leonard A. Lauder collection.
Next to it, Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow), estimated at $80 million, offers a completely different view of the Attersee landscape – a crazy mix of wildflowers that's so abstract it actually got Klimt accused of being insane back in the day. The third painting, Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee), is expected to fetch over $70 million. Painted during Klimt's last summer at the lake, it's a more thoughtful piece and thought to be his last landscape. Together, these paintings give us a rare look at Klimt's later style. But make no mistake, the portrait of Elisabeth is the real star and might even break Klimt's auction record (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/klimt-masterpiece-lady-with-a-fan-sells-for-94-3-million-achieving-european-auction-record-1234672701/), which was set in 2023 when Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) sold for about $108.4 million.
Claude Monet, Nymphéas, $40 Million–$60 Million at Christie’s
This painting, from the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, was created in a burst of energy after a winter of reworking in the studio. Instead of the usual horizontal layout, it's cropped in tight, almost confrontational. The water's surface looks abstract, and the lilies seem like scribbled notes. You can see why Monet showed this one in a big 1909 exhibition: it pushes the subject to the very edge of being recognizable.
And this is the part most people miss: the real story here is Monet's artistic ambition. By 1908, he was in a slump, struggling to create something great with his "Nymphéas" series – as a current Brooklyn Museum show (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/claude-monet-venice-brooklyn-museum-review-1234756443/) points out. These later paintings are special because they feel like an early tryout for 20th-century abstraction.
Vincent van Gogh, Piles de romans parisiens et roses dans une verre (Romans parisiens), Estimated Around $40 Million, at Sotheby’s
Among all the amazing lots this season, van Gogh's Romans parisiens, from the Pritzker Collection, really stands out. It's a key piece from his time in Paris, when he was experimenting with avant-garde styles and figuring out how to use color to express emotions. Around 1887, he was swapping paintings in cafes, chatting with Toulouse-Lautrec, and seeing Impressionist art up close, even though he wasn't completely convinced by it. According to Sotheby's, this painting, created in the last months of 1887, is one of only four still lifes with books that van Gogh made during his two years in Paris, and it's the biggest one to hit the market since the late 1980s.
Pablo Picasso, La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse), Estimated Around $40 Million at Christie’s
Picasso's 1932 portraits of Marie-Thérèse have become a big deal in the art market. Femme assise près d’une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse), also from that year, sold for $103 million in 2021. La Lecture, from the Ross Weis Collection, is another example of that time when his work was so clear, sensual, and sculptural. Picasso returns to one of his favorite subjects: a woman reading. He painted it over and over that year. But unlike the paintings where Marie-Thérèse looks out or daydreams, this one captures her completely focused, chin on her hand, lost in her book and unaware of Picasso watching her. The pastel colors, the soft light on her face, and the visible charcoal lines show how quickly and confidently Picasso worked during this period, when drawing and painting became one.
Mark Rothko, No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), Estimated at $50 Million, at Christie’s
Painted in 1958, the year Rothko started the Seagram murals, No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) from the Ross Weis Collection is from a brief, intense period before his colors got darker in the 1960s. This painting shows Rothko at his best, layering bright fields of red, peach, pink, and yellow inside a border that seems to both contain and radiate energy. He wanted viewers to "feel that presence the way you feel the sun on your back," and No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) is one of the clearest ways he expressed that idea.
Frida Kahlo, El sueño (La cama), $40 Million–$60 Million, at Sotheby’s
Frida Kahlo's El sueño (La cama) is the emotional heart of the season: a self-portrait from 1940 where her personal stories, Mexican symbols, and Surrealist drama come together. Painted during a time of political chaos and personal heartbreak – Trotsky's murder and her split from Diego Rivera – the painting shows Kahlo caught between life and death. Vines wrap around her body, while a skeleton with dynamite hangs above her on the bed. This isn't just symbolism; it's her reality. Kahlo reportedly slept under a papier-mâché skeleton during this time, a constant reminder of death.
With an estimate of $40–60 million, El sueño (La cama) could not only break Kahlo's own auction record (Diego y yo sold for $34.9 million at Sotheby's New York in 2021) but possibly the record for any female artist (https://www.artnews.com/list/art-news/artists/women-artists-breaking-auction-records-1234736471/lee-bontecou/). The painting shows Kahlo at her most honest and vulnerable. It's no surprise that Sotheby's has made it the centerpiece of their Surrealist collection.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Crowns (Peso Neto), $35 Million–$45 Million, at Sotheby’s
Painted on Christmas Day in 1981, right after his 21st birthday, Crowns (Peso Neto) was created as Basquiat went from being a downtown sensation to an art world phenomenon. That year, Basquiat moved from the streets into the studio, and critics and collectors started to understand his ambitions. In the painting, the ordinary and the sacred mix into his own personal world, creating tension between how he saw himself and how the world saw him.
This huge painting brings together the symbols that would become his signature: spiritual signs, body parts, words, and a three-pointed crown. Its history shows how important it was to his career, appearing in his first solo show in the US and in later shows that shaped how people remember him after his death.
Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red and Blue, $20 Million–$30 Million, at Christie’s
Mondrian's Composition with Red and Blue, from the Ross Weis Collection, is from the time when he was fleeing Europe with a bunch of unfinished paintings. Signed “PM 39–41,” it's one of the works he kept working on as he moved from Paris to London and finally to New York, changing the shapes while the political world was being redrawn around him.
That back-and-forth between order and chaos is what makes this painting so interesting. The black lines create structure, but the colors push against them, almost breaking free. It's a reminder that Mondrian's grids weren't just calm abstractions, but negotiations with chaos. As one of the few works completed during that escape, Composition with Red and Blue is less a monument to perfection and more a sign of a painter holding on to his principles in the face of history.
Edvard Munch, Sankthansnatt (Midsummer Night), $20 Million–$30 Million at Sotheby’s
Munch's Sankthansnatt (Midsummer Night), from the Lauder Collection, was painted between 1901 and 1903. It's from the same series of paintings from Åsgårdstrand that are often seen as a peaceful contrast to his darker work. But this painting is more complex than that. Yes, the midsummer light softens the shoreline and the houses, and yes, the scene seems calm. But it's a staged kind of calm, as if Munch was testing how much emotion he could get out of a place known more for its painters than its drama. It's not really an antidote to The Scream, but more like its uneasy cousin: a quiet scene where the emotions are just hidden beneath the surface.
Max Ernst, Le roi jouant avec la reine, $14 Million–$18 Million, at Christie’s
Max Ernst made Le roi jouant avec la reine – being sold from the Ross Weis Collection – in a Long Island garage in 1944, while sharing a summer rental with Dorothea Tanning (who has an amazing painting in Sotheby's Exquisite Corpus sale, and whom Ernst would later marry) and his dealer Julien Levy. It's hard to imagine that this sculpture, now considered one of Surrealism's greatest bronzes, was created in such a humble setting. The work came from Ernst's lifelong obsession with chess, a system of symbols he liked more than religious symbols, and one he trusted more than the ideas his movement claimed to challenge. Instead of treating the piece as a simple story, Ernst creates a scene that's not easily explained: a human-sized "king" that's part chess piece, part creature, and part unreliable narrator.
Yves Klein, Sculpture éponge bleue sans titre (SE 167), $14 Million–$18 Million, at Sotheby’s
Yves Klein's SE 167 is one of the large sponge sculptures he made in 1959, a year when his belief in the immaterial was stronger than the materials he was using. Made of a rough stone base topped with a bunch of soaked, blue-pigmented sponges, the piece is simple but unmistakably Klein, using his signature shade of blue. The sponges hold the pigment, and the pigment grabs your attention. Here, blue acts like a spiritual force.
Only six works of this size by Klein exist; half are in major museums. That makes this one's reappearance after so long significant.
Francis Bacon, Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer, $13 Million–$18 Million, at Phillips
Bacon's Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer was painted in 1967, when he was at his peak. He used the small 14-by-12-inch format to create intensity. It's the first of only 12 diptychs in that size, and one of only two that place Rawsthorne and Dyer – two of the most important people in his life – side by side. Bacon didn't just collect people; he orbited them, and these two were central: Rawsthorne, with her sharp features, and Dyer, whose presence in his work would become heavier and more troubled as their relationship fell apart.
Sotheby's catalog sees Bacon's circle as a kind of Soho pantheon, but the truth is simpler: he repeatedly painted the people he drank with, fought with, and depended on. Between 1963 and Dyer's death in 1971, Bacon created 40 portraits of him; Rawsthorne appears almost as often. What matters here isn't the stories but the arrangement: two heads sharing a diptych, neither looking at the other, both caught in Bacon's familiar mix of affection, distortion, and dread. It's a small format doing a lot of emotional work.
It’s worth noting that at Sotheby’s London last month it took 20 minutes and more than 20 bids for someone to walk away with Francis Bacon’s Portrait of a Dwarf (1975), which hammered above its £6 million to £9 million estimate, ultimately bringing in £13.1 million with fees (about $17.6 million). Will something similar happen here?
Henri Matisse, Figure et bouquet (Tête ocre), $15 Million–$25 Million, at Christie’s
Painted in early 1937, Figure et bouquet (Tête ocre) – from the Ross Weis Collection – is from the time when Matisse finally returned to painting after years of making murals, retrospectives, and taking long trips that doubled as artistic breaks. The result isn't a complete reinvention but a recalibration: broad, simple blocks of color set against thin, delicate lines. Matisse's cut-outs are still his most famous works of the 1930s, but paintings like this show a more interesting tension – a painter trying to figure out how much structure he could remove before everything fell apart.
Franz Kline, Placidia, $10 Million–$15 Million, at Christie’s
To my eye, Kline is the only postwar heavyweight whose paintings feel as alive as people say Abstract Expressionism felt. (Okay, I admit it, I’m a fan.) Placidia, painted in 1961 and being sold from the Ross Weis Collection, proves it. At more than five by seven feet, the canvas acts like a live wire, black bars slashing through white space with a speed that makes most of his contemporaries' works look tame by comparison.
Kline liked to say there was no hidden story, and maybe there isn't. The painting's rarity on the market (a half-century in one private collection) isn't the point. The point is that Placidia captures the part of AbEx that still feels modern: the refusal to be pretty, the impatience with metaphors, the sense that painting is an event, not an illustration. I’m biased, but this one has a pulse.
Joan Mitchell, Untitled, $10 Million–$15 Million, at Phillips
Painted just before Joan Mitchell left New York for France, this untitled work from 1957–58 is crowded but not chaotic. Coils of red, yellow, and green racing toward a bright center, then pulling back before everything explodes. Mitchell understood that white wasn’t empty – it was also full of tension. The drips, the tangles, the sudden pockets of air – none of it is accidental, and none of it indulges the macho mythologies of the men who founded Abstract Expressionism. It’s one of the big New York-period Mitchells where you can feel the tectonic plates of her style shifting in real time.
Agnes Martin, The Garden, $10 Million–$15 Million, at Sotheby’s
Agnes Martin's The Garden (1964), from the Lauder Collection, is from the years when her grids were at their most precise. A six-foot square field of pale whites, yellows, and greens, the painting is made of rectangles so close together that they almost cancel each other out – which is exactly the point, because Martin wasn’t offering enlightenment. She was testing how little a painting could do while still holding the viewer in place.
The grid here is drawn by hand, the pencil lines barely visible. The surface hums because every tiny shift in tone feels earned, not mystical. It's a great example of Martin's lifelong argument that clarity is more radical than expression. If Martin's delicate pictures knock your socks off, I’d suggest a visit to Pace Gallery, where 13 works from her “Innocent Love” series are on view from November 7 through December 20 – and of course, a visit to the Breuer Building, where Sotheby’s is showing works such as this one before selling them.
Why Sotheby’s Dominates the Top End This Season
Sotheby’s seems to have grabbed most of the really impressive pieces this season, and it's obvious. Eleven of the 15 highest-estimated lots are from the house, including all three of the best Klimts, the amazing van Gogh, and the Basquiat. This is partly due to their strategy of focusing on single-owner collections with a lot of power, but it's also about timing. The Lauder collection alone could have changed the season, but combined with the Pritzker group and a strong contemporary showing in “The Now,” it basically controls the top end. Christie’s does well with the Ross Weis collection, but the power balance is clear.
The estimates tell one story; the bidding will tell another. In a season marked by caution, the top of the market still leans toward spectacle, and this year’s November sales show that the desire for blue-chip names hasn’t disappeared – it’s just become more discerning. Whether that discipline holds under the lights of the saleroom is the last question left.
Honorable Mention: Cera, Juvenile Triceratops Skeleton, $2.5 Million–$3.5 Million, at Phillips
The art market's dinosaur craze has gone from a novelty to its own asset class, and Cera – a remarkably complete juvenile Triceratops – arrives right on time. Unearthed in 2016 in South Dakota’s Hell Creek Formation, the skeleton has over 70 percent original bone, which is unheard of for a young animal whose bones are usually crushed long before fossilization. The mounting, finished earlier this year at the Sauriermuseum Aathal in Switzerland, gives the creature a poised, almost curious look – a Late Cretaceous teenager caught mid-stride.
But the real headline is the market. Dinosaurs are now competing with Picassos and Rothkos! Last year, Christie’s London sold three skeletons – including two Allosaurus and a Stegosaurus – for £12.4 million. In July, a juvenile Ceratosaurus blew past its $6 million estimate to hit $30.5 million (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/juvenile-ceratosaur-dinosaur-fossil-sothebys-auction-record-1234747766/) at Sotheby’s, the same house that sold Ken Griffin a $44.6 million apex predator in 2024 and a $32 million T. rex in 2020. Against that backdrop, Cera isn't just a paleontological prize; it’s a status symbol in a market that has decided prehistoric bones and blue-chip art can share the same stage.
Unlike the massive adult specimens that usually make headlines, a juvenile Triceratops actually shows how the species grew. That makes Cera scientifically valuable, not just visually impressive. Whether it ends up in a museum or a private collection, its importance is clear: this is the kind of specimen researchers rarely get to study, and collectors are increasingly treating it like a Basquiat with real horns instead of painted ones.
What do you think? Is the art market being too cautious, or is this a smart move? And are dinosaurs really the new Picassos? Let me know in the comments!
