The Low Highs of the 2023 Auction Market

Pablo Picasso’s Femme à la montre (1932) was the most expensive work sold at auction this year, fetching U.S. $139.4 million in Sotheby’s sale of works from the Emily Fisher Landau collection.

That’s a princely sum, but it would barely have reached third place in last year’s list. In 2022, Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) brought in $195 million, while Georges Seurat’s Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite Version) (1888) garnered $149.2 million.

The other works that sold for over $50 million this year were Gustav Klimt‘s Dame mit Fächer (1917) for $106.8 million and Insl im Attersee (ca. 1901) for $53.2 million, Claude Monet‘s Le bassin aux nymphéas (1919) for $74 million, Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s El Gran Espectaculo (1983) for $67.1 million, and Francis Bacon‘s Figure in Movement (1976) for $52.1 million.

The least expensive work to make the top 10 this year was Henri Rousseau’s Les Flamants (1910), which sold for $43.5 million, barely half the price of last year’s tenth place-getter, René Magritte‘s L’empire des lumières (1961), which fetched $79.2 million.

Zooming out, Artsy found that the top 100 lots at auction brought in $2.4 billion in 2023, a precipitous drop from the $4.1 billion fetched in 2022.

They noted that while interest in ultra-contemporary artists (born after 1974) is growing—boosting primary market prices—you could’ve purchased the top 500 lots by these artists using the money spent on just the two most expensive works by dead painters.

A report by Artnet found that the market for ultra-contemporary art cooled by more than 25% to $184.2 million in the first half of 2023. Artists who nevertheless set new records at auction this year include Jenna Gribbon (b. 1978), Jia Aili (b. 1979), Marina Perez Simão (b. 1980), Mohammed Sami (b. 1984), Ilana Savdie (b. 1986), and Jadé Fadojutimi (b. 1993).

Looking ahead to 2024, auction houses will be encouraged by signs of a soft landing in the world’s biggest art market, the United States. It may, however, be some time before collectors are ready to offer up their most expensive works at auction.

In a survey published by Art Basel and UBS last month, only 26% of collectors planned to sell works from their collections over the next 12 months—down from 39% in 2022—with most expecting prices for their works to go up in the future. —[O]

Main image: Sotheby's Chairman and Auctioneer Oliver Barker fielding bids during the auction of The Emily Fisher Landau Collection. Courtesy Sotheby's.