Lots to Watch in the November Auctions This Year

Sotheby’s leads the season with a formidable Klimt trio from the Lauder Collection. One work towers over the others: Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer, the six-by-four-foot portrait commissioned by Serena and August Lederer, the artist’s most important patrons. Klimt painted their daughter at the height of his powers, orchestrating a blend of ornament, color, and iconography that makes the picture as much a monument to Viennese modernism as it is a likeness. Its history is equally charged—confiscated during the war, narrowly escaping the fire that destroyed much of the Lederer collection, and held in the Leonard A. Lauder collection for four decades.

Alongside it, Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow), which has an estimate of $80 million, offers a radically stylized vision of the Attersee landscape, a kaleidoscope of native wildflowers rendered with the abstraction that once earned Klimt accusations of madness. 

The third in the trio is Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee), which the house expects to bring in more than $70 million. It was painted during the artist’s final summer at the lake, adds a more contemplative note and is believed to be his last surviving landscape.

Together they make a rare cross-section of Klimt’s late style—but the portrait of Elisabeth is unmistakably the crown jewel and could very likely top Klimt’s auction record, which was set in 2023 at Sotheby’s in London when the artist’s Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan), from 1917–18, sold for about $108.4 million.

Painted in a burst of productivity after a winter of studio reworking, this painting from the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art abandons the polite horizontality of earlier versions in favor of a tight, almost confrontational crop. The water surface tilts toward abstraction; the lilies flicker like loose notation. You can see why Monet hung this one in a landmark 1909 Durand-Ruel exhibition: it pushes the motif to the edge of legibility.

The real story behind these pictures is the formal ambition. By mid-1908, Monet had hit a creative rut—as a current Brooklyn Museum show points out—and was having producing greatness with his “Nymphéas” series. The late ones he went on to produce earn their reputation because they look like an early rehearsal for 20th-century abstraction.

Among the season’s top lots, van Gogh’s Romans parisiens, from the Pritzker Collection, stands out as a landmark from the artist’s Paris period—a moment when he made emergent avant-garde styles his own and began to think through how color could carry psychological weight. By late 1887, he was exchanging canvases in cafés, debating ideas with Toulouse-Lautrec, and encountering Impressionist work firsthand, even if he remained skeptical of its broader program. According to Sotheby’s, the picture, made in the final months of 1887, is one of only four still lifes featuring books that van Gogh executed during his two years in the capital, and the largest of its kind to reach the market since the late 1980s.

Picasso’s 1932 portrayals of Marie-Thérèse have become a market force unto themselves—Femme assise près d’une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse), from the same year, made $103 million in 2021. La Lecture, from the Ross Weis Collection, belongs firmly to that moment of heightened clarity, sensuality, and sculptural form. Here Picasso returns to one of his most persistent motifs, the woman absorbed in reading, a subject he reworked repeatedly across that year. Unlike the versions in which Marie-Thérèse glances outward or drifts into reverie, this canvas captures her in a state of private concentration, chin resting on her hand as she bends over the book, oblivious to the artist’s gaze. The pastel planes, the soft fall of light across her face, and the visible charcoal underdrawing all point to the speed and confidence with which Picasso worked during this period, when drawing and painting merged.

Painted in 1958—the year Rothko began the Seagram murals, the project that would define his late career—No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) from the Ross Weis Collection belongs to a short, incandescent phase before his palette darkened during the 1960s. The painting shows Rothko working at full voltage, stacking luminous fields of red, peach, pink, and yellow inside a charged outer border that seems to both contain and radiate intensity. He described wanting his viewer to “feel that presence the way you feel the sun on your back.” No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) reads as one of the clearest expressions of that sentiment.

Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) is the psychological anchor of the season: a 1940 self-portrait where personal mythology, Mexican iconography, and Surrealist drama collide. Painted during a period marked by political upheaval and emotional turbulence—her former lover Trotsky’s assassination, and her separation from Diego Rivera—the work shows the artist suspended between life and death, vines coiling around her body while a skeleton festooned with dynamite rests above her on the bed’s canopy. The imagery is not merely symbolic invention but lived experience: Kahlo is said to have slept beneath a papier-mâché skeleton during this time, a reminder of mortality as intimate companion.

With an estimate of $40–60 million, El sueño (La cama) is positioned not only to eclipse Kahlo’s own auction record (Diego y yo sold for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2021) but potentially the standing record for any woman artist. The painting captures Kahlo at her most introspective and unguarded. No surprise that Sotheby’s has placed it at the center of its marquee Surrealist consignment.

Painted on Christmas Day in 1981, just after his 21st birthday, Crowns (Peso Neto) was produced as Basquiat was vaulted from downtown prodigy to art-world phenomenon. This was the year Basquiat moved from the street into the studio, as well as the year critics and collectors began to grasp the range of his ambition. In the painting, the secular and the sacred blur into a private cosmology, enacting a tension between his self-image and the one the world was already projecting onto him.

The monumental work gathers the emblems that would become his visual signature: spiritual glyphs, anatomical fragments, bursts of language, and a three-point crown. Its exhibition history reinforces its status as a hinge in his career, appearing in his first US solo show and in later retrospectives that shaped his posthumous reputation.

Mondrian’s Composition with Red and Blue, from the Ross Weis Collection, belongs to the period when the artist was fleeing a collapsing Europe with a bundle of half-finished canvases tucked under his arm. Signed “PM 39–41,” it’s one of the works he amended in stages as he moved from Paris to London and finally to New York, adjusting the geometry while the political map was being redrawn beneath him.

That push-and-pull between order and upheaval gives this painting its bite. The black bars impose discipline, but the color fields press against them, threatening to misbehave—a reminder that Mondrian’s grids weren’t serene abstractions so much as negotiations with chaos. As an example of the small group of works completed during that escape route, Composition with Red and Blue is less a monument to purity than evidence of a painter holding on to principle in the face of history’s indifference.

Munch’s Sankthansnatt (Midsummer Night), from the Lauder Collection, was painted between 1901 and 1903. The work comes from the same stretch of Åsgårdstrand paintings that usually get packaged as an idyllic counterweight to his darker work, but the picture is more interesting than that binary suggests. Yes, the midsummer light softens the shoreline and the clapboard houses, and yes, the scene appears tranquil—but it’s the kind of tranquility that feels slightly staged, as if Munch were testing how much atmosphere he could wring from a place better known for its painters than its drama. The whole thing reads less as an antidote to The Scream than as its uneasy cousin: a quiet scene in which the emotional voltage has simply gone underground.

Max Ernst made Le roi jouant avec la reine—selling from the Ross Weis Collection—in a Long Island garage in 1944, while sharing a summer rental with Dorothea Tanning (who has a marvelous picture in Sotheby’s Exquisite Corpus sale, and whom Ernst would ultimately marry) and his dealer Julien Levy—hardly the setting one imagines for a sculpture now treated as Surrealism’s great bronze. The work grew out of Ernst’s lifelong obsession with chess, a system of symbols he preferred to inherited religious iconography, and one he trusted more than the metaphysics his movement claimed to overthrow. Rather than treat the piece as a tidy allegory, Ernst stages a scene that refuses to settle: a human-scaled “king” that is part chess piece, part creature, part unreliable narrator.

Yves Klein’s SE 167 is one of the large sponge sculptures he made in 1959, a year when his belief in immateriality ran well ahead of the materials he was actually using. Composed of a rough stone base topped with a cluster of soaked, pigment-saturated sponges, the piece is simple in construction and unmistakably Klein, making use of his trademark shade of blue. The sponges cling to the pigment; the pigment clings to the eye. Here, blue behaves like a metaphysical force.

Only six works of this scale by Klein exist; half are kept by major museums. That makes this one’s reappearance after decades significant.

Bacon’s Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer was painted in 1967, when the artist was at full tilt, and uses the tight 14-by-12-inch format he favored for its compressed intensity. It’s the first of just 12 diptychs in that size, and one of only two that place Rawsthorne and Dyer—two of the most charged presences in his life—side by side. Bacon didn’t collect sitters so much as orbit them, and these two were central: Rawsthorne, with her sharp, architectural features, and Dyer, whose presence in his work would grow heavier and more fraught as their relationship unraveled.

Sotheby’s catalog treats Bacon’s circle as a kind of Soho pantheon, but the truth is simpler: he repeatedly painted the people he drank with, fought with, and depended on. Between 1963 and Dyer’s death in 1971, Bacon produced 40 portraits of him; Rawsthorne appears nearly as often. What matters here isn’t the mythology but the arrangement: two heads sharing a diptych, neither looking at the other, both caught in Bacon’s familiar churn of affection, distortion, and dread. It’s a small format doing a lot of emotional heavy lifting.

It’s worth noting that at Sotheby’s London last month it took 20 minutes and more than 20 bids for someone to walk away with Francis Bacon’s Portrait of a Dwarf (1975), which hammered above its £6 million to £9 million estimate, ultimately bringing in £13.1 million with fees (about $17.6 million). Will something similar happen here?

Painted in early 1937, Figure et bouquet (Tête ocre)—from the Ross Weis Collection—comes from the period when Matisse finally returned to the easel after years spent making murals, retrospectives, and long-distance escapes that conveniently doubled as artistic sabbaticals. The result isn’t a grand reinvention so much as a recalibration: broad, unmodulated slabs of color locked against thin, nervous contours. Matisse’s cut-outs remain his most famous works of the 1930s, but paintings like this one show a more interesting tension—a painter trying to decide how much structure he could strip away without the whole thing falling apart.

To my eye, Kline is the only postwar heavyweight whose paintings actually look as alive as people claim Abstract Expressionism felt. (Okay, I admit it, I’m a fan.) Placidia, painted in 1961 and selling from the Ross Weis Collection, is proof. At more than five by seven feet, the canvas behaves like a live wire, black bars slashing through white space with the kind of velocity that makes most of his contemporaries’ works look mannered by comparison.

Kline loved to insist there was no hidden narrative, and maybe there isn’t one. The painting’s rarity on the market (a half-century in one private collection) isn’t the point. The point is that Placidia captures the part of AbEx that still feels modern: the refusal to prettify, the impatience with metaphor, the sense that painting is an event, not an illustration. I’m biased, but this one has a pulse.

Painted just before Joan Mitchell left New York for France, this untitled work from 1957–58 shows is crowded but not chaotic. Coils of red, yellow, and green racing toward a bright center, then pulling back before the whole thing detonates. Mitchell understood that white wasn’t empty—it was also full of tension. The drips, the tangles, the sudden pockets of air—none of it is accidental, and none of it indulges the macho mythologies of the men who founded Abstract Expressionism. It’s one of the big New York–period Mitchells where you can feel the tectonic plates of her style shifting in real time.

Agnes Martin’s The Garden (1964), from the Lauder Collection, comes from the years when her grids were at their most exacting. A six-foot square field of pale whites, yellows, and greens, the painting is built from rectangles so close that they almost cancel each other out—which is exactly the point, because Martin wasn’t offering enlightenment. She was testing how little a painting could do while still holding the viewer in place.

The grid here is drawn by hand, the pencil lines barely visible. The surface hums because every tiny shift in tone feels earned, not mystical. It’s a great example of Martin’s lifelong argument that clarity is more radical than expression. If Martin’s delicate pictures knock your socks off, I’d suggest a visit to Pace Gallery, where 13 works from her “Innocent Love” series are on view from November 7 through December 20—and of course, a visit to the Breuer Building, where Sotheby’s is showing works such as this one before selling them.

Sotheby’s appears to have secured most of the season’s genuine trophy material, and the distribution isn’t subtle. Eleven of the 15 highest-estimated lots come from the house, including all three of the season’s most impressive Klimts, the marvelous van Gogh, and the Basquiat. Part of this is consignment strategy—Sotheby’s has leaned into single-owner collections with concentrated firepower—but part of it is simply timing. The Lauder collection alone could have reshaped the season, but paired with the Pritzker group and a strong contemporary slate in “The Now,” it effectively monopolizes the upper bracket. Christie’s holds its own in the Ross Weis collection, but the balance of power is clear.

The estimates tell one story; the bidding will tell another. In a season defined by caution, the top of the market still tilts toward spectacle, and this year’s November sales show that the appetite for blue-chip names hasn’t gone away—it’s just become more discriminating. Whether that discipline holds under the lights of the saleroom is the last question left.

The art market’s dinosaur boom has graduated from novelty to its own asset class, and Cera—a remarkably intact juvenile Triceratops—arrives squarely in that new reality. Unearthed in 2016 in South Dakota’s Hell Creek Formation, the skeleton retains over 70 percent original bone, an unheard-of figure for a young animal whose bones are typically crushed long before fossilization. The mounting, finalized earlier this year at the Sauriermuseum Aathal in Switzerland, gives the creature a poised, almost curious stance: a Late Cretaceous teenager caught mid-stride.

But the real headline is the market context. Dinosaurs are suddenly competing with Picassos and Rothkos. Last year, Christie’s London moved a trio of skeletons—including two Allosaurus and a Stegosaurus—for £12.4 million. In July, a juvenile Ceratosaurus blew past its $6 million estimate to hit $30.5 million at Sotheby’s, the same house that sold Ken Griffin a $44.6 million apex predator in 2024 and moved a $32 million T. rex in 2020. Against that backdrop, Cera isn’t just a paleontological prize; it’s a status object in a market that has decided prehistoric bone and blue-chip art can share the same stage.

Unlike the hulking adult specimens that tend to dominate these headlines, a juvenile Triceratops actually clarifies how the species grew. That makes Cera scientifically valuable, not just visually impressive. Whether it lands in a museum or a private showroom, its importance is obvious: this is the kind of specimen researchers rarely get to touch and collectors increasingly treat like a Basquiat with real horns instead of oil stick ones.