[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Roy-Lichtenstein-Anxious-Girl.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tA 1960s canvas by Pop master Roy Lichtenstein, coming from the collection of a legendary New York collector-dealer who famously patronized the Pop artists, could become one of the artist\u2019s top works to sell at auction. <\/p>\n
Anxious Girl <\/em>(1964) bears an estimate of between $40 million and $60 million. If it achieves its high estimate, it will be his second-priciest work at any public sale. The painting, which will lead the house\u2019s marquee 20th-century art evening sale on May 18, comes from the holdings of Holly Solomon and her husband Horace.<\/p>\n \n\tThe news comes amid other announcements of high-value lots coming to the block courtesy of Christie\u2019s and Sotheby\u2019s (including the $53 million Wingate collection at Sotheby\u2019s and a $35 million Renoir at Christie\u2019s) as they aim to drum up excitement for their big May sales. In December, both houses posted improved 2025 results, suggesting stabilization in an unsteady auction market. Christie\u2019s closed 2025 with $6.2 billion in global sales, up nearly seven percent from the previous year\u2019s $5.8 billion, while Sotheby\u2019s boasted $7 billion, a 17 percent increase over 2024 and the strongest result in the company\u2019s history.<\/p>\n \n\tLichtenstein\u2019s auction record stands at $95.4 million, paid for Nurse <\/em>(1964), at Christie\u2019s New York in 2015. The piece went to a single bidder, speculated by some to be the house\u2019s head, Fran\u00e7ois Pinault; it had passed through the hands of respected collectors including Peter Brant, Barbara Lee, and Karl Stroher. His current second-highest auction price is $56.1 million, paid for Woman With Flowered Hat <\/em>(1963), which riffs on Pablo Picasso\u2019s Cubist style. Seven of the artist\u2019s top ten works at auction date from the first half of the 1960s.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe present work, according to the house, is one of just 10 from between 1963 and 1965 that offer a tight focus on a woman\u2019s head. It shows the woman\u2019s skin rendered in Ben-Day dots, a printing method invented in the late 19th century and famously appropriated by the New York artist, who reproduced it by hand on his canvases. The woman\u2019s face mimics that of a woman in the cover of a 1963 DC Comics publication from 1963, Girls\u2019 Romances #97, \u201cToo Much To Ask!\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAnxious Girl<\/em> is a best-in-class example of Roy Lichtenstein, from 1964, the pinnacle of his career,\u201d says Sara Friedlander, chairman of postwar and contemporary art, in press materials. \u201cCompositionally, the painting showcases the artist\u2019s singular ability to distill complex visual cues into three core elements\u2014line, color, and form\u2014and formally employ them into conveying deep human emotion through timeless love stories and comic book-inspired imagery.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe Solomons were prominent collectors of art by the likes of Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. In 1966, she commissioned Warhol to produce his now famous nine-paneled portrait of her; she was also portrayed by artists including Richard Artschwager, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Robert Rauschenberg. One year after Anxious Girl<\/em>, Lichtenstein portrayed Solomon in the painting I\u2026I\u2019m Sorry<\/em>, once owned by the collector and now in the collection of Los Angeles\u2019s Broad Museum.<\/p>\n \n\tLichtenstein and Pop art will be a focus of New York institutions in the coming months, with the Guggenheim Museum opening \u201cPop: 1960 to Now\u201d and the Whitney Museum staging a Lichtenstein retrospective, which will open this fall.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/lichtenstein-christies-holly-solomon-anxious-girl-1234782772\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Roy-Lichtenstein-Anxious-Girl.jpg?w=1024″] A 1960s canvas by Pop master Roy Lichtenstein, coming from the collection of a legendary New York collector-dealer who famously patronized the Pop artists, could become one of the artist\u2019s top works to sell at auction. Anxious Girl (1964) bears an estimate of between $40 million and $60 million. If it achieves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1906990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1906990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1906990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1906990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1906990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}