“Nobody wants to be asked to sell something that isn’t going to sell well,”
Ottilie Windsor, the co-head of Sotheby’s upcoming sale of modern and contemporary art in London, told me recently. She was previewing the sale, but also keenly aware of the market’s equivocal mood some two years into the dip. Tom Eddison, her partner in producing the sale, spoke of “renewed energy and optimism” and “positive green shoots for the year going ahead,” but that didn’t necessarily mean it was easy to procure works for auction in this uncertain
environment. Windsor recounted how the duo had to make compelling arguments to consignors. “We’ve looked for things we think the market wants,” she told me. And they’ve backed some of those key lots with irrevocable bids, which reminds the market that a buyer already exists.

Across London, other specialists have likewise assembled sales based on their perception of the current market. Big collections don’t
drive the auctions here, unlike in New York, and these sales definitely feature some artists who are more locally than globally relevant. But London nevertheless sends a wide range of early market signals that the houses—and many dealers—hope will guide the market for the rest of the year.

Sotheby’s top lot is a Yoshitomo Nara
painting from 2005, Cosmic Eyes (in the Milky Lake). It’s one of the artist’s handful of large paintings of a single girl figure—this one has radiant eyes painted with glitter—and it’s had only two owners in the past 20 years. The work is estimated at £6 million and backed by an irrevocable bid. A
similarly sized work of a single figure, from 2006, sold for nearly $8.4 million just 17 months ago, which is not far from where things would end up if this work goes to the guarantor. Larger works have gone for significantly more. That raises the question: Does someone want this one more?

Then there is a large Gerhard Richter abstract
painting called Heu, painted in 1995. Its estimate is surprisingly accessible—that is, if your idea of accessible is £5 million. But Richter abstracts that are 2 meters tall, like Heu, can command serious eight-figure sums. This one is priced much lower for three reasons. First, its light tones lack the bright
colors that collectors prize in these big Richters. (Although Eddison and Windsor say the painting looks quite impressive when you see the colors in person.) The painting is presumably titled Heu, or “straw,” for a reason. Second, the work comes from the mid-1990s, whereas the bigger prices tend to chase 1980s works. Finally, a year and a half ago, a very red Richter abstract painting from the mid-1980s offered in London failed to find a bidder at an estimate just below $20 million. So
the consignor here is taking zero chances. The work was bought for only $2 million 15 years ago, so even at this estimate level, money will be made.

Works by Pablo Picasso,
Lucio Fontana, and Banksy round out the top five lots by estimate. I have previously written about
the Banksy work, from the artist’s well-known Crude Oils series, which mocks the work of artists like van Gogh, Monet, and, in this case, the popular British self-taught artist Jack Vettriano. All three works are estimated above £3 million. Lower down the estimate ladder, a posthumous cast of a Constantin Brancusi
statue is being offered at £2.5 million, with a guarantor having already stepped up to claim it. An important Alberto Burri sack work
is also estimated at £2.5 million and also guaranteed. 

Then there’s a so-called gray painting by Christopher Wool, from 2008, on offer with a £2 million estimate. Sotheby’s is pitching the fact that many other
works from this series are already in museum collections like the Broad in L.A., the Tate in London, the Art Institute in Chicago, and New York’s MoMA; similar paintings have sold for more than $8 million in the past. The consignor bought this painting in 2008, and there has never been another owner. Top works by Wool might be down from their peak of nearly a decade ago, but if someone gets this painting for that £2 million estimate, many collectors will end up quite jealous. 

South African artist Lisa Brice astounded the market three and a half years ago when No Bare Back, After Embah, from 2017, sold for 15 times the estimate of $200,000. Since then, no work by the artist has sold for anywhere near that threshold. But Sotheby’s is going to see what appetite remains for works from that series when they offer After Embah, a sister
painting created in 2018, with a £1 million estimate and a guaranteed buyer. 

A similar story played out with abstract painter Rachel Jones. Her 2019 work, Spliced Structure (7), sold for $1.2 million
three years ago, just after another work of hers made a price two-thirds that level. Now Sotheby’s has Red, Forged, from 2023, with a £300,000 estimate and an irrevocable bid to back it up.

The rest of Sotheby’s tight evening sale of 40 lots contains some other interesting telltales. With a
Roy Lichtenstein retrospective on the horizon in 2026, there are two minor works in this sale—but one, a small monochrome painting, Peanut Butter Cup (1962), which was held in the same collection for 60 years, has an estimate of only £1 million. A Hurvin Anderson
painting, Country Club – Mixed Doubles, from 2011, comes back to market with a £500,000 estimate. The directly guaranteed lot was sold less than four years ago for approximately the same price. The same is true for an Andy Warhol
painting of Camouflage, from 1986-87, which is estimated at £1.8 million, or pretty much the same price as the work sold for a decade ago. 

Nearly a third of the lots in Christie’s 20th/21st century London evening sale
have third-party guarantees, which tells you a bit about the current market phase. There are clearly buyers and sellers, but, for the most part, there are not a lot of risk-takers—with some notable exceptions.

In previous newsletters, I’ve mentioned the top lots by Tamara de Lempicka and Francis Bacon. Both are backed with third-party guarantees at £5 and £6 million,
respectively. You can add those to a list of 14 more works backed by third parties, including a Jenny Saville drawing bought just three years ago, estimated at £800,000; a small Amedeo Modigliani portrait estimated at £4 million; a
Jean-Michel Basquiat work on paper from 1983, estimated at £2.5 million; and finally a collaboration between Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Francesco Clemente, from 1984, estimated at £800,000.

Other works that already have buyers locked in come from a group of British artists and include School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna by Michael Andrews, from 1978, which has been in the same collection since and is estimated at £3 million; a David
Hockney landscape from 2006, estimated at £4 million; Frank Auerbach’s Primrose Hill – Early Summer, from 1981-82, estimated at £2 million; and a tiny Lucian Freud portrait, Mark the
Collector, from 2008, estimated at £1.2 million.

One collector who is not looking for downside protection is the consignor of a work by Christian Schad. Last November, a huge new price of nearly $3.2 million was set for a portrait of Anna
Gabbioneta, a decade after the seller paid three quarters of a million dollars for the work. There must have been a number of underbidders, though, because we’re seeing a smaller portrait of the far more interesting Eva von Arnheim estimated at £800,000 this season. The work was previously sold at auction for around $840,000 as far back as 2006. There’s no hard and fast
logic to pricing, but there’s a good chance this portrait will sell in the neighborhood of the Schad sold last year. 

A relatively small Cy Twombly work on paper, a precursor to his 1970 Roman Notes series of drawings, is priced at £1.5 million—about
where a similar, though arguably weaker, image sold last year. But it’s below the $3 million that some of these works have sold for at auction in the past. And there are a number of other interesting stories at Christie’s, including the run of in-demand primary works by Danielle Mckinney, Justin Caguiat, Sanya Kantarovsky, and Emmi Whitehorse, being resold in the first four lots of the sale.

Christie’s
is also holding its annual sale of surrealist art. Of course, the top lots are all by René Magritte, with estimates ranging from £1.5 million to £6 million. On the other end of the spectrum are two Leonora Carrington works estimated at £400,000 and £500,000. These are the in-demand names right now in the surrealist market. But some other heavy-weight surrealist painters who haven’t been getting much market attention lately are Paul Delvaux and
Max Ernst. This sale tries to rectify that with three works by Delvaux from the same consignor. Meanwhile, Ernst’s beguiling Coloradeau de Méduse, from 1953, is being offered with a £700,000 estimate. It has never been offered publicly before.

Phillips, which prides itself on making markets for artists who have recently
emerged on the primary market, leads off with a painting by Ding Shilun, who just had a prominent show at the ICA Miami. There’s also a work by Florian Krewer, who studied with Peter Doig and Nathanaëlle Herbelin, the latter of whom had a show at Musée d’Orsay last year. 

Phillips’s
top lot, meanwhile, is a Joan Mitchell painting from 1975, Canada II, which is estimated at £3 million and has never been on the auction market before. Basquiat’s 1984 painting Pattya is estimated at £2 million. The
house has two Christopher Wool works on offer. One, Lester’s Sister (My Brain), from 2000, plays with Wool’s themes of mechanical reproduction and gestural abstraction; it’s backed by a guarantor at £1.2 million. The other, one of the few small word paintings ever to come to auction, with the phrase “You Make Me,” is estimated at £600,000. There’s
also an early 1931 painting by Le Corbusier, estimated at £950,000. 

The Trump/DOGE cuts have gotten so bad that staff inside
USAID are now lashing out at other agencies. It seems from this story in The Atlantic that someone inside the State Department is mad that so many life-saving and important USAID programs got cut even as the State’s long-standing and vaunted Art in Embassies program appeared at first to be moving ahead on schedule. So they got
in touch with Laura Barrón-López to complain. 

The Art in Embassies program has been going on for decades. It’s an extension of broader American efforts carried out by the State Department—and even the C.I.A.—to use American modern art, particularly abstract expressionism, to convince citizens of other nations of American cultural superiority and freedom. You cannot blame the good
people at USAID, who are under attack for simply having done their jobs creating humanitarian programs, for resenting a feckless administration that appeared initially to have spared a program to decorate embassies at the same time they were cutting food aid.

I’m not sure we should be rooting for the art purchases to be halted. But it really isn’t clear from Barrón-López’s story what the actual status of the program is now. She quotes a spokesperson at State saying
the program was suspended, but that person could provide no concrete details. That said, the long-term value of the Art in Embassies program should be evaluated in a proper process. It certainly should not be blamed for Elon Musk’s attacks on the rest of the State Department and USAID.

We can all contemplate while we wait to be in touch again on Tuesday. Let’s
speak then.

M