Ten Highlights From New York’s Spring Marquee Auctions

Giacometti’s Hand-Painted Head

Estimate in excess of $70 million

Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction

May 13, 7 p.m. EDT

This seminal work by Alberto Giacometti stands as both a testament to his ability to capture the existential fragility of human existence with profound psychological depth and evidence that his art was grounded in the intimate observation of those closest to him. Elevating a personal, familial portrayal into a universal meditation on the human condition, Giacometti shaped a deeply poignant sculptural reflection on both the physical structure and emotional essence of life itself.

One of the rare Postwar bronzes by Giacometti to come to auction, this intense portrait of his brother and lifelong muse, Diego Giacometti, is expected to sell for more than $70 million. Only six casts of the work exist, and the estimate reflects sustained market strength for comparable examples: one sold for $53 million at Christie’s in 2010; another reached $50 million at Sotheby’s in 2013. This cast also benefits from a distinguished exhibition history and provenance, having been shown at the 1956 Venice Biennale and displayed for nearly two decades at the Fondation Maeght in southern France before its acquisition in 1980 from Galerie Maeght by billionaire art collector Sheldon Solow, who died in 2020.

The consignor, the Soloviev Foundation—a nonprofit established by Solow’s son—declined to comment, but the sale proceeds are reportedly intended to support the foundation’s mission. This May, the Soloviev Foundation will be notably present in New York with “Between Distance and Desire: African Diasporic Perspectives,” an exhibition curated by Tumelo Mosaka that features works from its collection alongside eight contemporary artists. On May 8, it will also unveil Path of Liberty at Freedom Plaza, a six-acre public art installation conceived as a prelude to America’s 250th anniversary in celebration of the founding ideals of freedom and diversity.

Riggio’s Iconic Mondrian

Estimate in the region of $50 million

Christie’s, “Leonard & Louise Riggio: Collected Works”

May 12, 6.30 p.m. EDT

One of the very few works of this quality and iconicity, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue by Piet Mondrian—painted in Paris in 1922—will be offered by Christie’s as part of the thirty-nine-lot single-owner sale of the Leonard and Louise Riggio collection, a trove of masterpieces expected to generate over $250 million.
An exemplar of Mondrian’s most mature articulation of Neo-Plasticism, the painting is a rigorous geometric composition meant to express the most essential forces and primordial structures of reality. Working with an extremely reductive and ascetic visual language—strictly straight lines and primary colors—Mondrian sought the purest equilibrium of form and color, a harmonious order capable of reintroducing beauty into life at its most elemental level. In his tireless pursuit of “a true vision of reality,” Mondrian forged a radical new mode of abstraction that synthesized all essential binaries: vertical and horizontal, dynamic and static, masculine and feminine. Though seemingly simple, these compositions are the result of an intense and meticulous process of analysis, deconstruction and recomposition—a delicate balancing act of symmetry and asymmetry, presence and restraint. Beneath their formal austerity lies a spiritual clarity and a universal language of transcendence and order distilled from the visible world.
Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio and his wife Louise loaned the work to major museum exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A comparably rare and rigorous Mondrian was last offered at Sotheby’s in 2022, where it achieved $51 million, setting a new auction record for the artist—a benchmark this painting may well surpass.

Lucio Fontana’s Gold End Of God

Estimate: $12-18 million

Sotheby’s, “Im Spazio: The Space of Thoughts”

May 15, 7 p.m. EDT

Offered separately as part of the single-owner sale dedicated to Daniella Luxembourg’s $30 million trove, which will precede Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction, Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio is one of the rare gold examples from the thirty-piece series The End of God—paintings that represent the absolute apex of Fontana’s artistic œuvre.
With its ovular form evoking both eternity and generation, yet violently lacerated with punctures and slashes reminiscent of the lunar surface, the work fully embodies Fontana’s groundbreaking pursuit of a space both within and beyond the canvas, “tied to the cosmos as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture.” Conceived in the aftermath of the moon landing, the series marks an aesthetic and philosophical rupture with previous notions of painting and reality—a release of new energy and spatial experience as humanity entered a new chapter of civilization.
In spirit, the series echoes Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead”; Fontana signals here the collapse of traditional religious, metaphysical and artistic belief in the modern age. As he wrote in his Manifesto Blanco, “The discovery of new physical forces, the mastery of matter and space, have gradually imposed unprecedented conditions on mankind… Calling on this change in man’s nature, the moral and psychological changes of all human relations and activities, we leave behind all known art-forms, and commence the development of an art based on the union of time and space.”
With La fine di Dio, Fontana arrived at a radical synthesis of existence, nature and matter, binding them into a singular cosmic unity. The work comes to auction with both an irrevocable bid and a third-party guarantee. Last May, Sotheby’s sold another Fine di Dio from the esteemed Rachofsky Collection—a 1964 yellow example, one of only four—for $22,969,800 against a $20-30 million estimate. Given its rarity and resonance, this gold version has strong potential to surpass the current $29.2 million auction record for the series, set at Christie’s New York in 2015 for another yellow example.

Basquiat’s Baby Boom

Estimate: $20-30 million

Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale

May 14, 7 p.m. EDT

The top lot leading Christie’s evening sale dedicated to 21st-century art is an iconic Jean-Michel Basquiat from what is arguably his best year—the same year as the artist’s most recent record-setting sale, the $22.95 million Basquiat that sold, also at Christie’s, last November, cementing his status as the most expensive contemporary artist at auction.
Presented on a wooden support, the intricately layered image features a trio of roughly sketched humanoid figures, exemplifying the artist at his most masterful. Resembling a three-paneled Renaissance altarpiece, the work contemplates themes of family lineage, royalty and spirituality, as noted by Isabella Lauria, Christie’s head of 21st-century art sales, in a statement.
First exhibited at Basquiat’s 1982 show at Fun Gallery, the painting reemerged on the market through Lévy Gorvy Gallery (now Gorvy Dayan Gallery) at Art Basel’s flagship edition in Basel in 2017. At the time, Artnews reported that the consignor was Peter Brant, who was seeking $30 million for the work. Brant originally acquired it at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg’s New York auction in May 2001 for $1.1 million, above its $700,000–900,000 estimate. Even if Baby Boom only achieves its low estimate this season, the sale would represent a 1718.18 percent appreciation for the collector. Underscoring its significance in Basquiat’s oeuvre, the painting has appeared in several of the artist’s most celebrated retrospectives over the past two decades, including exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum (2005), the Fondation Beyeler (2010) and the Fondation Louis Vuitton (2019).

A Rothko From the Bass Mansion

Estimate on request, in the region of $35 million

Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale

May 14, 7.30 p.m. EDT

A group of nine abstract masterpieces from the storied Bass House collection is leading Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale, representing one of the most highly anticipated consignments the auction house has secured this season.
The star lot is a sober yet luminous painting by Mark Rothko in plum and black, offered with an estimate in the region of $35 million and backed by a third-party guarantee. Painted between 1950 and 1951 (one of the defining moments of Rothko’s mature period) the contemplative canvas features the artist’s signature floating rectangular forms, built through intricate layering of pigment that lends the surface a glowing, almost immaterial quality. Beneath the two saturated color fields—a deep expanse of opulent purple topped by a jagged band of black—an undercurrent of orange and yellow radiates through, suggesting a quiet inner light animating the composition from within.
“A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an experience,” Rothko once remarked, underscoring his belief that abstraction was not a conduit for personal expression but a space of encounter—an invitation to contemplative immersion. His color fields evolved into icons of Postwar abstraction, their spiritual resonance echoing the aura of religious imagery, talismans or sacred texts. Playing with the viewer’s perception, the hues seem to shift and pulse, transforming the painted surface into a portal—an entryway to realms that transcend both sensory and intellectual limits.
The work was first unveiled in Rothko’s final exhibition with Betty Parsons in 1951 and later featured in the landmark group show “15 Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1952. The Basses acquired the painting in 1980 from Marlborough Galerie A.G. following an exhibition in Zurich, and it has remained largely out of public view ever since.

An Early Basquiat Drawing

Estimate: $10-15 million

Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction

May 15, 7:30 p.m. EDT

One of the stars of Sotheby’s contemporary and ultra-contemporary art auction is a recently rediscovered early work by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The drawing reveals the young artist’s explosive energy, creative urgency and restless ambition, capturing the agitation and societal pressures that fueled his early drive to “make it.” Seemingly chaotic and almost furious, the marks across the canvas channel a raw, improvisational subconscious force while opening moments of clairvoyance into both Basquiat’s inner life and the extraordinary trajectory that lay ahead.
Created in 1981, when Basquiat was just 20 years old, the incendiary five-foot-wide oilstick work remains as vivid and vital today as it was at the moment of its execution. Held in the same private collection since 1989, the work has remained unseen by the public for over three decades.

Monet’s Crepuscular Peupliers

Estimate: $10-15 million

Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction

May 15, 7:30 p.m. EDT

A crepuscular painting by the father of Impressionism, painted in 1891, comes to auction with exceptional provenance and a distinguished exhibition history. The work was first shown just a year after its creation in the Monet exhibition “Série des peupliers des bords de l’Epte” of 1892 and was acquired by the legendary dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, whose family retained it until 1955 before it passed into a private collection, where it has remained for more than 60 years.
With delicate, small touches of paint, Monet captures the subtle vibrations of light and color in a scene where poplar trees are immersed in a softly glowing sky, blending shades of blue, lavender, pink and pale green. This painting is one of nine from the series, whose other examples now reside in the permanent collections of some of the world’s most important art institutions, including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Tate in London; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.
Monet remains one of the few artists in the Modern category to maintain a consistently strong market over time. Last November, his Nymphéas (1914–17) from Sydell Miller’s collection sold for $65.5 million following a 17-minute bidding war, with the winning bid placed by Sotheby’s Asia deputy chairman Jen Hua via telephone. Unsurprisingly, the painting leading Christie’s sale was first unveiled in Taipei, as demand for Monet’s work remains particularly strong in the region.

Olga de Amaral’s Evening Sale Debut

Estimate: $300,000–500,000

Phillips’ Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

May 13, 5 p.m. EDT

Phillips is offering a monumental composition of handwoven linen encrusted with gold leaf, part of Olga de Amaral’s celebrated Images Perdidas series. Rooted in pre-Columbian traditions and reviving the symbolic and auratic value historically attributed to textiles, the Colombian artist approaches weaving as both a code and a document—a language in which ancient wisdom and spirituality encounter contemporary sensibilities. Transcending both functionality and any association with craft, these fabric works are imbued with a sense of sacrality, standing as monuments, steles, columns or portals that celebrate the possible connections between human and cosmic order.
The auction follows several years of meteoric rise for de Amaral, both in the market and institutionally, cemented by her major exhibition at Fondation Cartier in Paris. Now represented by Lisson Gallery, her prices have rapidly climbed from the five-figure range of her earlier regional market to the six figures, reflecting strong international demand. The estimate aligns with today’s primary market pricing, but as access to works of this time and quality becomes increasingly limited, the piece will likely exceed its presale estimate.

A Trove of 40 Lichtensteins

Estimate: $35 million total

Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction

May 15, 7.30 p.m. EDT

The auction house is partnering with the Lichtenstein family to offer forty works by the American Pop icon in its Evening and Day Contemporary auctions. This new consignment follows the successful sale of an initial group of eleven works from the Collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein last November, which brought in $18.6 million, surpassing its $12.7 million pre-sale estimate.
Spanning paintings and sculptures, the lots offer a sweeping overview of the artist’s visual engagement with mass-produced imagery, particularly comics. The group traces Lichtenstein’s evolution across four decades, from his early experiments with abstract expressionism to his breakthrough Pop works of the 1960s, his modernist reinterpretations from the 1970s, the celebrated Reflections series of the 1980s and his interiors and nudes of the 1990s.
Among the most anticipated highlights, Reflections: Art offers a conceptual, self-referential meditation on the meaning of art and its role as a mirror of reality. With a high estimate of $6 million, the ingenious text-based trompe l’oeil presents art reflecting on itself, confronting timeless questions around its purpose. Carrying the same estimate is Woman: Sunlight, Moonlight (1996), a sculptural bust linking classical art history to Pop through Lichtenstein’s inventive, subversive critique of established canons and genres. The work is one of only two examples executed in wood ahead of the bronze edition of six; the second wooden example is held in the collection of the Whitney in New York.

Ed Ruscha in a Blue Mood

Estimate: $4-6 million

Phillips’ Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

May 13, 5 p.m. EDT

Another highlight of the Phillips sale is Ed Ruscha’s Alvarado to Doheny (1998), which returns to the market for the first time in 25 years amid the artist’s ongoing rise at auction. This momentum has been fueled by a major survey that debuted at MoMA in New York before traveling to LACMA in Los Angeles. Ruscha’s recent institutional spotlight helped propel him from 127th to 13th place in Hiscox’s 2024 artist rankings by total sales value, with $9,138,054 generated at auction last year. Largely driving this result was the record-setting sale of Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964), which achieved $68.2 million at Christie’s last November.
Alvarado to Doheny exemplifies Ruscha’s singular approach, combining a snowy depiction of Paramount Mountain with a bold text-based composition. Emblematic of the West Coast Pop Art movement, the work captures Ruscha’s semiological and philosophical investigation into how imagery and language intersect to reshape viewer perception. Here, the grandeur of nature collides with urban and pop culture references—Paramount’s mountain logo serving as an enduring symbol of the movie industry—creating a striking juxtaposition between landscape and cityscape.
A work with the same subject by Ruscha will also be offered by Christie’s in their 21st Century Evening Sale: Blast Curtain (1999), estimated to sell for $4-6 million. It will be interesting to see which version buyers ultimately prefer. The Christie’s example carries a slightly more notable exhibition history, having been shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Miami Art Museum, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.