The Richest Art Auction Season in History Continues This Week
New York’s marquee November sales pick up where the Paul Allen sale left off, with a $3 billion-plus tally likely after all the hammers fall.
Joan Miró’s Femme, Étoiles from 1945.
Source: Sotheby’s
In light of Wednesday’s $1.5 billion Paul Allen auction, where just 60 works became the largest single-owner sale by value ever, it feels almost quaint to describe New York’s forthcoming November sales as “mega.” And yet in the next week, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips are set to auction roughly 2,000 lots estimated to total as much as $1.9 billion.
If anything, auction house specialists predicted the Allen sale will have injected confidence into a market wobbling, ever so slightly, from fears of a global recession. “It’s the oxygen that will make the art market’s pulse race,” says Brooke Lampley, Sotheby’s chairman and worldwide head of sales for global fine art, speaking ahead of the Allen auction. “People are looking to it as a bellwether.”