Chandelier bidding. Quiet phone banks. Executives wiping their brows.
One of the most anticipated auctions of the season proved to be anticlimactic on Monday evening at Christie’s in New York, where many objects were pre-sold to guaranteed bids and there was little evidence of the enthusiastic buyers who defined the market’s peak in 2022. Experts said the sale was marred by the economic uncertainty surrounding President Trump’s tariffs and how they might hurt the global art market.
Louise Riggio consigned nearly 40 works from the collection she built with her husband, the Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio, who died last year. A second auction on Monday night, called the 20th Century Evening Sale, fared better, with some artworks selling above their estimates and livelier bidding on the phones and in the room.
The auction house had guaranteed the consignors an undisclosed minimum amount for their entire collection and then worked feverishly in recent days to offload the auction house’s risk, object by object, by finding outside buyers to leave their own pre-sale bids on works by modern masters like Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti.
At first glance, the Riggio collection appeared to have done fine with a $272 million total, including buyer’s fees. But stripped of the fees, the sale fell short of the auction house’s pre-sale expectations that included a low estimate of $252 million.
“Coming in? It should be now, ideally,” said the auctioneer, Adrien Meyer, at one point, struggling to find bidders on one of the lower-priced items in the sale, a terra-cotta vase by Picasso that ultimately sold within its estimate for $567,000, including fees.
The top lot of the Riggio sale was a 1922 gridded painting by Mondrian that had once greeted visitors in the grand entryway of the bookstore tycoon’s Park Avenue apartment. It sold for $47.6 million, including fees. The canvas, “Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue,” fell short of the previous record for a Mondrian, $51 million, set just three years earlier at Sotheby’s.
The canvas — no bigger than a throw pillow, at nearly 21 inches square — was still a showstopper in a bleak sale.
The art dealer Brett Gorvy said the Mondrian’s failure to spark a bidding war was a result of its aggressive estimate, about $50 million. “This wouldn’t have been such an issue a year ago when real depth of bidding was a major factor for driving prices.” he said. “Overpricing at the start was a deterrent with many collectors, despite the quality and rarity of the work.”
As the first major sale of the auction season, the Riggio collection was seen as a bellwether for this week’s major sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips, which have a combined estimate from $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion.
The 20th Century Evening Sale that followed finished with a total of $217 million including fees, against a low estimate of $194 million — squeaking by when taking into account the buyer’s fees. A major setback came mid-auction when the company announced it was withdrawing the season’s most expensive Warhol painting, “Big Electric Chair,” which had carried an estimate of about $30 million.
“The weakness of the Warhol market is a definite takeaway.” said the art adviser Jacob King after exiting the auction floor. “There is so much uncertainty in the financial markets, the response of the auction houses was to put guarantees on everything.”
But there were some signs of life. Paintings by Gerhard Richter, Vincent van Gogh and Helen Frankenthaler sold for above their high estimates, a sign of demand in the art market.
“Peupliers au Bord de l’Epte, Crépuscule,” an 1891 Monet painting of poplar trees sold for nearly $43 million including fees, after a five-minute bidding contest. The lawyer Thomas Danziger, who represented the anonymous seller behind the canvas, said the purchase — within the auction house’s estimate of $30 million to $50 million — was a positive sign.
“The world has obviously changed since the frothy art market of 2022,” said Danziger. “When it’s a choice between a blue chip painting and a more speculative artwork, a savvy collector is likely to say ‘Show me the Monet.’”
Not all sales were created equal, however, and some successful transactions demonstrated how far the market had fallen for certain artworks.
A painting by Lucio Fontana that had sold for nearly $14 million at Christie’s in 2017 (or $17.4 million when adjusting for inflation) returned to the auction house on Monday evening. It sold for just $7.5 million, including fees.
Bonnie Brennan, the chief executive at Christie’s, said the company had a positive performance. “It was a solid result,” she said. “Would we have liked to see even more excited bidding in the room? Of course.”
As Alex Rotter, Christie’s global president, added: “It’s a healthy market. One needs to work it very hard.”