On May 14, 2025, Miss January, an oil on canvas by the South African artist Marlene Dumas, sold at Christie’s New York for $13.6 million, the highest price ever achieved at auction by a living female artist. Dumas’s painting had been consigned by Mera and Don Rubell, founders of the Rubell Museum in Miami, and the proceeds of the sale will allow the couple to continue collecting and supporting emerging artists.
Art News
New York’s marquee spring auctions have wrapped with a combined $2.5 billion in sales across Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips.
A monumental 1983 Jean-Michel Basquiat canvas, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), heads to Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Auction this May with an estimate of $45 million.
The Joachim-Ma violin, crafted in 1714 by the great luthier Antonio Stradivari of Cremona, Italy, sold at Sotheby’s New York on February 7 for $11.3 million (est. $12-18 million). While it had been expected to top the $15.9 million paid in 2011 for the so-called “Lady Blunt” Stradivari, the record remained intact.
While Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer was sold for a record-breaking $236.4 million after a 20 minute bidding war, a solid gold toilet, titled America by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, drew far less fanfare at Sotheby’s recent auction.
Amid reports of the auction market’s steady decline, Sotheby’s has clinched a collection from the estate of Leonard Lauder valued at more than $400 million.
Just last year, a seemingly ordinary oil painting, attributed to a “follower of Julius Caesar Ibbetson,” an 18th-century British painter, sold for £400 ($506) at Dreweatts auction house in London. The buyer initially believed the piece to be that of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s, a French refugee and painter living in London. However, when the painting was sent out for cleaning, it was returned to its new owners with J. M. W.
A cast of Camille Claudel’s masterpiece, The Age of Maturity (1894), has recently been found in a vacant Paris apartment and is suspected to fetch between $1.5 to $2 million at auction.
A pair of Dorothy Gale’s famous ruby slippers, worn while filming The Wizard of Oz, went to auction late last week and made a staggering record for the highest priced sale of film memorabilia.
As November auctions kick off in New York with Sotheby's Modern Art Evening— led by one of Monet’s Nymphéas (circa 1914–17) and Picasso’s La Statuaire (1925)— Sotheby's Geneva had a special lot last week that surprised bidders and spectators.
