Auction Houses Shake Off Slump

Top-tier, single-collection sales fueled a late-year rally, but the auction market in 2025 still managed just a C- on the HENI Auction Index. After two stagnant years and D grades in both 2023 and 2024, that modest uptick was a relief.

Fine art sales at the big three auction houses reached $6.5 billion in 2025, up 13% year over year, even as the number of lots offered—more than 30,000—fell 15%. Both figures are a third below the decade average, however.

The market still has ground to make up but is moving in the right direction.

Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips generated a third of their annual revenue in their marquee week of sales in New York in the fall.

Led by Leonard Lauder’s collection, Sotheby’s launched its new HQ in the former Whitney museum building with a $1.2 billion week of sales. The cosmetic billionaire’s Klimts included the record breaking Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which fetched $236.4m when fees were added.

Another artist’s auction record fell when Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait, El sueño (La cama), sold for $54.66m with fees in the Exquisite Corpus auction, another single-collection sale that week, also at Sotheby’s.

The Klimt became the most expensive modern painting and the Kahlo the most expensive work by a female artist to sell at auction.

Christie’s sale of 30 works acquired by the late Barnes & Noble founder, Leonard Riggio, and consigned by his widow, Louise, proved a bit of an anticlimax in May but it still generated $272m.

In the fall, the sale of Robert and Patsy Ross Weis’s collection totaled an impressive $218m. Their Rothko led the sale, fetching $62m with fees.

Art collected by another notable husband and wife team, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson went under the hammer that week. Their Warhol Last Supper, sold for $8.13m with fees.

Christie’s, which sold $3.17 billion of fine art in 2025, finished the year slightly below its 2024 performance—trailing Sotheby’s and Phillips across more than ten metrics tracked by the HENI Auction Index.

A positive development for the auction houses was a significant rise in the percentage of strong Guarantees and irrevocable bids. They included Lauder's Klimt, the record breaking Kahlo, Warhol's Last Supper and the Weises’ Rothko, which all sold above their high estimate.

Phillips’ sales totaled $358m, down on its 2024 total but its overall performance on the HENI Auction Index improved to a C from a C-. In 2026, the auction house will have to manage without the “rainmaking” skills of former chairwoman Cheyenne Westphal.

In 2025, about 60% of all works hammered above their low estimates, and half of those managed to make it past their high estimates. That is still about 7 percentage points below average.

The average hammer to mid estimate ratio improved slightly to 1.3, meaning that works, on average, hammered 30% above the average of their low and high pre-sale estimates, up from 20% last year.

Also, on the positive side, the percentage of lots bought-in fell further to 15%, helping improve the overall HENI Auction Index grade for 2025 to a C-.

Not every work with a celebrated provenance - and backstory - shone at auction this year. Maurizo Cattelan’s solid-gold toilet, also known as America was consigned by the billionaire collector Steve Cohen at Sotheby’s. The 18-karat gold sculpture sold for $12.1m with fees, about the cost of the material.

Methodology: for how the HENI Auction Index classifies sales, see here