Christie’s introduced on Tuesday that its projected gross sales complete for the primary half of 2025 (H1-2025). The $2.1 billion determine, together with charges, equals the sum it generated throughout the first half of 2024 (H1-2024).
Whereas final 12 months’s complete marked a 22 p.c year-on-year decline in comparison with identical interval for 2023, Alex Rotter, Christie’s international president, advised journalists throughout a Zoom name that this 12 months’s plateau was partly right down to “renewed curiosity” in “pockets of Twentieth and Twenty first century artwork.”
Does this imply the marketplace for trendy and modern artwork is stabilizing after a drawn-out decline? Not essentially. Robust gross sales in its luxurious classes counter the even-keeled totals in a lot of the artwork classes. Christie’s bought virtually 30 p.c extra purses, watches, vehicles, and jewellery throughout H1-2025 than H1-2024, producing $468 million, or 22 p.c of the $2.1 billion complete.
Rotter, nonetheless, was fast to emphasise the areas of the artwork market which have “executed nicely,” including, “The narrative that the market is down is overly simplistic,” he mentioned. “We’re seeing Impressionist and trendy works having fun with sturdy development in comparison with 10 or 15 years in the past.” Outdated Masters, for instance, recorded a 15 p.c enhance in gross sales to $55 million, largely due to Christie’s a February sale in New York, which took in $24.4 million. Whereas the outcome was nonetheless shy of its pre-sale excessive estimate of $33.2 million, it trumped the $13.7 million the home generated at an Outdated Masters sale in January 2024.
Rotter additionally pointed to what he known as a constructive “psychological shift” from collectors sparked by Christie’s “creating pleasure available in the market.” He continued, “We’re not reinventing artwork, however we’re revisiting classes and artists. Final 12 months, you noticed a return to Surrealism, and a deal with feminine Surrealist artists.”
Final fall’s blockbuster Surrealism survey on the Centre Pompidou in Paris, timed to have a good time the motion’s centenary, helped gas collector curiosity. This previous March, Christie’s London turned over £130.3 million ($174.4 million), together with charges, throughout a three-hour, 72-lot double-header public sale of Twentieth- and Twenty first-century artwork heavy on Surrealism. The standout lot was René Magritte’s La reconnaissance infinite (1933), which soared previous its £6 million ($8 million) estimate to promote for £10.3 million ($13.7 million).
Throughout Tuesday’s press convention, Christie’s supplied numerous incisive statistics into the home’s $2.1 billion determine. Assured heaps, for instance, accounted for only one.5 p.c of all heaps bought in H1-2025, up from 1.3 p.c in H1-2024. The index of hammer value to low estimate was 115 p.c, that means that the profitable bids for all heaps bought (earlier than charges) outdid their minimal expectations by round 15 p.c. Throughout each on-line and reside auctions in all classes, the home notched a sell-through charge of 88 p.c (on par with its figures for this era in 2023 and 2024).
Extra broadly, Christie’s bought seven of the highest 10 works bought at any public sale home in H1-2025, inlcuding the 12 months’s highest-priced work thus far: Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Giant Crimson Aircraft, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black, and Blue (1922). It bought for $46.7 million in New York as a part of the Leonard and Louise Riggio sale, which totaled $272 million.
However the actual pleasure appears to be coming from the home’s bolstering luxurious gross sales. Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s worldwide head of jewellery, mentioned its purses, watches, and jewels classes have “recruited 41 p.c of Christie’s new consumers, lots of whom at the moment are transacting in lots of different classes.” (Encouraging shopping for throughout classes is a technique that each Christie’s and Sotheby’s have been pushing for some time.)
Final month, Christie’s New York bought the ten.38-carat “Marie-Thérèse Pink Diamond,” which can have been as soon as owned by Marie Antoinette, for $14 million, almost double its excessive estimate. Equally, Christie’s acquisition of the automobile firm Goodings final fall appears to have paid off, with automobile gross sales up 12 p.c towards final 12 months.
Taking a birds-eye view of the market, Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brenan mentioned that the “persevering with narrative [of] main single proprietor collections—not solely as property property, but additionally discretionary sellers—is a superb signal of confidence that the market is secure and safe.” AI, she mentioned, may also play a job in how Christie’s plans to function transferring ahead “to create larger efficiencies in our enterprise, to assist us when it comes to consumer prospecting, concentrating on, enhancing that have.”
So, what will kick-start the artwork market within the second half of the 12 months? “We’re at coronary heart an public sale enterprise,” Brenan mentioned. “We’re a enterprise the place enthusiasm comes from that power and pleasure within the room, and that’s all generated after we can get the widest viewers of bidders, and that comes from cheap pricing over pricing issues as a loss of life want.”
