![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Lot-11-Pablo-Picasso-Arlequin-Buste-1909-In-the-region-of-40m.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tMuch of the material in Tuesday\u2019s sale, like the Picasso, came from a named collection. In addition to the Donatis, works came from the collections of David and Shoshanna Wingate, Sybil Shainwald, the Durand-Ruel family, the Barbier-Mueller family, and the Latner family. That concentration of named provenance would be unusual for a single evening sale, if not for how heavily the market has rewarded fresh works with strong collector pedigrees. Just look at the results from Sotheby\u2019s Robert Mnuchin sale last week, or the S.I. Newhouse Jr. sale at Christie\u2019s, whose exhibition, according to the house, drew bigger crowds than the Paul Allen sale, long treated as the benchmark for this kind of trophy-property spectacle.<\/p>\n
\n\tJacob King, a New York-based advisor, told ARTnews after the sale that buyers remain \u201creally sensitive still to quality and to price,\u201d adding that \u201cunless it\u2019s really the absolute best, then maybe price goes out the window a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe biggest fireworks on Tuesday came at Lot 19, for Matisse\u2019s La Chaise lorraine<\/em>. Estimated at $25 million, the painting sold for $48.4 million after a bidding battle that stretched past 10 minutes and ultimately became the longest sustained contest of the evening.<\/p>\n \n\tThe result marked the second-highest price ever achieved for a painting by Matisse at auction and gave the sale its clearest jolt of genuine competition, though even that energy came framed with caution. Helena Newman, auctioneer and chairman of Impressionist and modern art, elegant in a green Victoria Beckham dress, leaned firmly on specialists with indecisive phone bidders. At one point, as the bidding slowed, she snapped: \u201cI\u2019m going to have to ask you to hurry up. The room has been very patient.\u201d There was a gasp, followed by applause, when the picture finally sold, though it was difficult to tell whether the room was celebrating the result or simply relieved the ordeal was over.<\/p>\n \n\tHeld in the Barbier-Mueller collection for decades, La Chaise lorraine<\/em> dates to 1919, one of the most important years of Matisse\u2019s Nice period, and belongs to a tiny group of monumental interiors whose sister works now sit in major museums.<\/p>\n \n\tAllegra Bettini, Sotheby\u2019s head of modern evening auctions, told ARTnews<\/em> that collectors responded to the painting because it rewarded close looking. \u201cPeople [were] showing up for quality and understanding a picture that is not the most obvious for the artist,\u201d she said after the sale.<\/p>\n \n\tThe evening\u2019s other major Matisse, La S\u00e9ance du matin<\/em>, appeared just two lots later. It told a quieter story: estimated at $20 million to $30 million, the work sold for exactly $20 million before fees, ultimately reaching $21.2 million with fees.<\/p>\n \n\tAnother major test came with Vincent van Gogh\u2019s La Moisson en Provence<\/em>, a rare watercolor from the artist\u2019s Arles period estimated at $25 million to $35 million. Bidding was more cautious than some specialists had predicted, with only two bidders competing. The watercolor ultimately sold for $29.4 million to a buyer from Asia. Even so, the result still ranked among the strongest ever achieved for a work on paper by the artist and set the second-highest auction price for a van Gogh watercolor. Oddly enough, the picture beat its own previous record for second place; back in 1997, it brought $14.6 million at Sotheby\u2019s London.<\/p>\n \n\tElizabeth Gorayeb, the former senior vice president of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby\u2019s and current executive director of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, described the work before the sale as \u201ca collector\u2019s picture,\u201d adding that \u201cit\u2019s not flashy\u201d and \u201cnot for the novice collector.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tEarly in the evening, Giacometti\u2019s La Clairi\u00e8re (Composition avec neuf figures)<\/em> was one of the sale\u2019s stronger tests of bidding at the high end. The sculpture sold for $23.1 million on an estimate of $18 million to $25 million after a five-minute bidding battle between three bidders, a relatively sustained contest in a room where many works sold far more quickly.<\/p>\n \n\tSotheby\u2019s had emphasized throughout the preview that a cast of the work had not appeared at auction since 2018 and that the sculpture belonged to a small group of ambitious multi-figure compositions Giacometti executed around 1950. Unlike some of the evening\u2019s more aggressively guaranteed trophy works, the bidding here felt comparatively organic, with the room visibly paying closer attention as the price climbed.<\/p>\n \n\tWorks from the collection of Jean and Terry de Gunzburg performed particularly well, extending the momentum from the couple\u2019s headline-grabbing Design Masters sale earlier this spring. Picasso\u2019s Buste de femme<\/em> sold for $5.4 million, while Paul Klee\u2019s Gartenfigur<\/em> climbed to $4.63 million after sustained bidding.<\/p>\n \n\tMeanwhile, the Donati grouping gave the sale much of its intellectual and emotional texture. In addition to Picasso\u2019s Arlequin (Buste)<\/em>, Wassily Kandinsky\u2019s Rote Tiefe<\/em>, appearing at auction for the first time, sold for $14.5 million. One of the quieter but more memorable pieces from the Donati group was Yves Tanguy\u2019s Aux Aguets le jour<\/em>, which had reportedly been gifted directly by the artist to the couple in the 1940s. The surrealist canvas ultimately sold to an Asian collector for $1.79 million.<\/p>\n \n\tSome of the evening\u2019s more revealing results came well below the headline trophy lots, where collectors competed for historically important works that also carried the potential to reset artist markets. Varvara Stepanova\u2019s Two Figures<\/em> came close, selling for $2.3 million after three bidders pursued one of the rare Constructivist oil paintings still in private hands. Sotheby\u2019s had positioned the work as a potential record contender for the Russian avant-garde artist, whose market has deepened as museums and collectors continue revisiting the history of Constructivism.<\/p>\n \n\tElsewhere, Leonor Fini\u2019s Portrait de Alida Valli II<\/em> sold for $1.15 million, while Leonora Carrington\u2019s El retorno de la osa mayor<\/em> reached $1.66 million. Neither lot broke records, but both reinforced the continued appetite for women surrealists, a category that has quietly become one of the most reliable pockets of momentum in the broader modern market.<\/p>\n \n\tCharles Sheeler\u2019s Windows<\/em> also drew attention, selling for $2.05 million and landing among the strongest prices achieved for the artist at auction. Meanwhile, Georgia O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s Pink Camellia<\/em> reached $2.56 million, becoming the second-highest price ever achieved for one of the artist\u2019s works on paper.<\/p>\n \n\tBy the end of the evening, Sotheby\u2019s appeared to achieve precisely what auction houses increasingly prize above all else right now: stability. The sale may not have restored the speculative frenzy that once drove collectors into bidding wars at nearly any price, but it suggested that exceptional material, carefully structured and strategically guaranteed, can still produce strong results in a more selective era.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/sothebys-modern-evening-sale-may-2026-results-1234786294\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Sothebys-Helena-Newman-auctioneering-the-Modern-Evening-Auction_2.jpg?w=1024″] A few minutes into Sotheby\u2019s Modern Evening Auction on Tuesday night, the pauses between bids began telling their own story. Collectors still showed up for the museum-quality material, particularly blue-chip works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and Vincent van Gogh, but the atmosphere inside the Breuer building often felt cautious […]<\/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-1946205","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\/1946205","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=1946205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1946205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1946205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1946205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Lot-28-Vincent-Van-Gogh-La-Moisson-en-Provence-est-25-35-million.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Lot-6-Varvara-Stepanova-Two-Figures-Executed-in-1921-est-1.2-1.8-million.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>