Following the momentum from the landmark Sotheby’s sale, Christie’s held its 20th and 21st Century auctions in New York on November 20–21, 2025. According to Christie’s, the combined sales realized $964,536,953, marking the highest total for this category at the auction house in the past three years. Across both sessions, the auctions achieved a 90% sell-through rate by lot and 96% by value, indicating strong participation relative to the presale estimates.
Mark Rothko — No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), 1958
The highest-priced work of the week was Mark Rothko’s No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) (1958), which sold for $62,160,000. The next two highest results were identical: Pablo Picasso’s La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse) (1932) and Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (1907), each selling for $45,485,000. The fourth highest result went to Henri Matisse’s Figure et bouquet (Tête ocre) (1937), which brought $32,260,000, and rounding out the top five was Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red and Blue (1939–1941), which sold for $23,060,000. Christie’s also reported bidder participation from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, noting that the buyer and underbidder activity spanned multiple global regions.
These numbers position the November 2025 series among Christie’s strongest recent auctions for modern and post-war art in terms of overall total, sell-through rate, and international bidding activity. With Rothko’s 1958 canvas leading the week and significant results also achieved for Picasso, Monet, Matisse, and Mondrian, the sale offered a clear benchmark of current confirmed market performance for historically significant 20th-century works.