Christie’s opened its Spring Marquee Week in New York on the evening of Monday, 12 May 2025 with two consecutive sales in the Rockefeller Center saleroom that together totalled $489 million, 99 percent sold by lot and 98 percent by value.
The first sale, Leonard & Louise Riggio: Collected Works, totalled $272 million, selling 97 percent by lot and 97 percent by value. The top lot of the evening came from this single-owner group: a Mondrian canvas, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue, which sold for $47.6 million, among the top three prices for the artist at auction. The sale was further led by Magritte’s L’empire des lumières, which realized $35 million, and a portrait of Lee Miller by Picasso, which achieved $28 million.
The second sale of the night, the 20th Century Evening Sale, achieved $217 million, selling 100 percent by lot and 100 percent by value. It began with nine lots from the single-owner collection Art from the Bass House, which was 100 percent sold for $73.2 million against an estimate of $60 million. Mark Rothko’s No. 4 (Two Dominants) [Orange, Plum, Black] led that group at $37.8 million.
The top lot of the sale was Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’ Epte, crépuscule, which achieved $43 million and set a new record for the artist’s Peupliers series. The sale also established records for works by female Surrealist artists, including Endgame by Dorothea Tanning and Revelación by Remedios Varo.
Records set on the night were Claude Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’ Epte, crépuscule at $42,960,000, Remedios Varo’s Revelación, also titled El relojero, at $6,221,000, Dorothea Tanning’s Endgame at $2,349,000, and Franz von Stuck’s Die Sünde, a record for a work on paper, at $604,800.
(Press Release)
