COMMENTS ON THE ART MARKET

Comments on the Art Market · November 2026

VOLUME 311

Dear Friends,

October is always one of the busiest months on the art calendar, and this year did not disappoint. London and Paris hosted back-to-back fairs and evening sales, and the results told a clear story: when great pictures come to market, buyers show up. A Monet set a new record for any work sold at auction in France, and dealers at Frieze Masters reported strong demand for historical material, a trend we know well here on 55th Street.

Field Notes, a new collection of paintings by Ben Bauer, is on view at Rehs Contemporary through November, and it is especially close to our hearts. The exhibition honors Howard and the meaningful role he played in Ben’s life (more below).

Looking ahead, all eyes turn to New York, where the marquee auctions begin the week of November 16. We will be watching closely and sharing our take in next month’s issue. It is also the season for holiday gifting: our Small Works show, featuring a wonderful collection of paintings perfect for giving, will be released online on November 20.

As Thanksgiving approaches, we also want to take a moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who continues to be part of our journey. To our collectors, clients, artists, readers, friends, and family, thank you for your continued support, encouragement, and friendship. This past year has reminded us just how meaningful the relationships we have built over the generations truly are. Whether you have been with us for decades or have only recently discovered the gallery, we are grateful to have you as part of the Rehs family.

From our family to yours, we wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with love, laughter, and time spent with those who matter most.

With gratitude,

Lance & Alyssa

NOW ON VIEW · REHS CONTEMPORARY

Field Notes

New Paintings by Ben Bauer

AN EXHIBITION IN HONOR OF HOWARD L. REHS

There is a particular stillness that settles over a marsh in the last hour of daylight: the wind drops, the temperature falls with the sun, and the world holds its breath for the birds about to arrive. Ben Bauer has spent his life inside that hour, and Field Notes is his invitation to share it.

Raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, Bauer learned the seasons tramping through cattails on family duck-hunting trips long before he picked up a brush. He placed first in his age group in the Minnesota Junior Duck Stamp competition as a teenager and went on to study painting at the University of Wisconsin–Stout. Today he describes his work simply as “recording a natural history”: real marshes, fields, and creek bends in the Upper Midwest, painted with the urgency of someone who has watched open land disappear. In this most recent body of works, if land is his subject, birds are its pulse. Sandhill cranes cross a sky the color of a struck match, and trumpeter swans are shown mid-conversation on winter water.

This exhibition is dedicated to Howard. Ben has called Howard the most influential person of his career, the dealer and mentor who helped make his life as a painter possible. Showing this body of work in his honor, in the gallery Howard built, means a great deal to all of us.

This November marks one year without Dad. It has been the hardest year of our lives to navigate, both personally and professionally. But through it all, the art we surround ourselves with has proven immensely therapeutic. So this month, we are happy to get lost in Ben’s paintings and the peace, serenity, and calm they bring; a feeling many of you know well from living with his work yourselves.

Last November, Ben and a fellow birdwatcher spent a quiet afternoon at Crex Meadows with few birds to show for it.

Then, as the light faded, the sandhill cranes began arriving: thousands of them, flock after flock, settling in to roost in total stillness. Only as it was happening did Ben realize it was the same day Howard was laid to rest. He dedicated the evening to him, and this painting is his report of what he witnessed.

It remains in Alyssa Rehs’s personal collection and is on view as part of the exhibition.

COMING NOVEMBER 20TH

Small Works

Paintings Made for Giving

Our annual small works show is our largest collection of the year: jewel-like paintings from Rehs Contemporary, sized to fit a favorite corner, a bookshelf or a stocking. If there is a collector on your list, or you are ready to start collecting yourself, this is the perfect place to begin.

The full show releases online on Friday, November 20, with a selection of works on view at the gallery at 20 West 55th Street.

THE STOCK MARKET

Tech Wreck & Market Turmoil: Is Wall Street Running for Cover?

What the heck is going on in the market right now?! I just sat down to write this piece (it’s Friday afternoon), and there’s an absolute bloodbath in the tech sector… Intel is down 30% today! The list of dark red is long – Reddit down 30%, Sandisk down 13%, AMD down 12%, Dell down 12%, Qualcomm down 12%, Applied Materials down 8%, Palantir down 6% and Nvidia down 5%... the final trading day saw steep enough declines to turn the S&P 500 negative for the month of October. That’s on the back of Alphabet (Google) having its worst day in company history yesterday (Thursday)… shares fell more than 12%, erasing nearly half a trillion dollars in market cap! That sell-off was nearly record-setting, as it was the second-largest single-day market cap loss in US history, only behind Nvidia’s early 2025 slide. For the month, Alphabet is down nearly 20% as concerns continue to bubble around AI infrastructure spending.

On the other end of the S&P, you have consumer staples, which are driving the support… Walmart is up nearly 20% this month, along with Altria Group (America’s largest tobacco producer), Colgate-Palmolive at 13%, Costco at 12%, Procter & Gamble at 12%, Coca-Cola at 10%, and Pepsi at 9%. To me, this indicates Wall Street sees highly strained consumers, and they are shifting their strategy into companies that usually benefit during economic hardship. Overall, the major US indexes saw mixed results in October… the S&P finished off down just over 1%, along with the Nasdaq which slid about 6%, while the Dow Jones was up about 1.5%. It’s also worth noting that the VIX (Volatility Index) has spiked… it’s up more than 35% in October, and nearly 30% alone on the final day of the month!

Turning to currencies and commodities… the European currencies were mixed – the Pound gained about 1.2% against the US Dollar, while the Euro slid by 1.6%. Crude is back above $100 and has been in that elevated range for a couple of weeks now… it’s up more than 16% in October. Coinciding with the movement in oil prices, Gold futures have declined considerably over the past 2 weeks, giving up more than 7%.

When it comes to crypto, we’re dealing with some breaking news… we woke up to learn that Binance, one of the largest holders of bitcoin on behalf of its millions of users, was the victim of a record-breaking hack of $6.3 billion in crypto assets. While they have assured users that their funds are completely safe and the company will absorb losses using internal capital, this is an alarming development with respect to blockchain security. In the past 24 hours, Bitcoin has shed more than 5% of its value, and is down more than 8% on the month. Ethereum and Litecoin fared even worse… down 17% and 18%, respectively. This whole fiasco is sure to rattle market confidence.

Zooming out, it seems the market is rapidly repricing risk – pulling back from volatile tech stocks and crypto while favoring a more defensive strategy. Although a sharp sell-off doesn’t tell us where the markets go next, it’s a sobering reminder of how quickly confidence can shift.

This commentary is for general interest only and is not investment advice.

ART MARKET TRENDS

Three Things We’re Watching

1. London is having its best year in a decade

Sotheby’s says its modern and contemporary total in London is the strongest since 2015 and more than double last year’s pace. Christie’s October evening sales there were up 103% from a year ago, with 91% of lots selling.

2. Historical art is drawing serious money

The top sale reported at Frieze week was not a contemporary work but a Jan Brueghel the Elder flower still life, placed for roughly $6.6 million. A Renoir landscape also sold early at Frieze Masters. Leading contemporary dealers are increasingly offering older masters alongside new work, which tells us where they see demand.

3. A new generation of buyers, and they love painting

The 2026 Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting, which polled about 3,100 high-net-worth collectors, found Gen Z spent an average of $347,460 on fine art in 2025, up 19% and more than double any older generation. They accounted for nearly half of all purchases over $1 million. Much of that influence comes from family: 40% of Gen Z collectors started collecting through relatives, and nearly 90% kept the works they inherited. And for all the talk of digital art, painting remains the most common first purchase across every age group, while 57% of collectors expect the market to keep growing this year. (link)

FROM OUR BLOG

Art World News

The Schlumberger Collection at Sotheby’s Paris

On Thursday, October 22nd, Sotheby’s Paris hosted a sale of spectacular nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings and sculptures from the Schlumberger family collection.

The Schlumbergers amassed their fortune through mining and petroleum technologies. While brothers Marcel and Conrad Schlumberger may have started the family business, Marcel’s wife, Jeanne, was mainly responsible for the family’s art collection. Through her relationship with art dealer Katia Granoff, Jeanne Schlumberger and her family became among the most prominent collectors of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and other modernist works of art. The family became particularly well known for its collection of Claude Monet’s late-career works, created between 1914 and his death in 1926. For decades after the artist’s death, the Schlumberger family collection was the only place other than the Musée de l’Orangerie and the Galerie Katia Granoff where one could view large numbers of later Monet paintings. Furthermore, Jeanne Schlumberger very rarely loaned the family paintings for exhibitions, if at all. This means the collection’s contents have not been seen publicly for decades, and many works are in near-perfect condition given the minimal handling and transport they have experienced

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The expected star of the evening was one such late-period Monet. The artist created Iris in the last years of his life, around 1924 or 1925. Before selling it to the Schlumbergers, Katia Granoff acquired the painting directly from Michel Monet, the artist’s son. Despite the water lily being practically synonymous with Monet and his paintings, the Impressionist master was equally fond of irises. His stepson Jean-Pierre Hoschedé wrote that the flower beds in Monet’s garden at Giverny were all lined with irises. What makes the work offered at Sotheby’s so different from some other works featuring this flower is that Monet completely abandoned any sense of perspective or depth. There is no background or foreground, no horizon line, just the flowers. The viewer does not know where the sky ends and its reflection in the pond begins.

By the end of his life, Monet had became obsessed with reducing his work to the purest essence of light and color, leading him to forgo traditional landscape conventions and omit the horizon line entirely, immersing viewers in pure atmosphere. The French critic Claude Roger Marx commented in 1909 that Monet wanted to “abolish the terrestrial setting that once closed off the horizon”. Iris is one of the largest of Monet’s late-career works still in private hands, and is arguably the best. Sotheby’s specialists expected Iris to sell for at least €22 million. While this would be a record-setting achievement for most artists at auction, Monet’s paintings have continued to achieve higher and higher prices. Six of the top ten most expensive Monet paintings sold at auction have crossed the block in the last five years. While Iris did not make the top ten on Thursday, it set a record of another kind. Bidding went on for a staggering forty-two minutes, with the hammer finally coming down at €43 million (or €50 million / $56.1 million w/p). This made Iris the most expensive work of art ever sold in France.

Four of the evening’s twenty-three lots were paintings by Claude Monet. One came from his series of paintings of the willow tree on his property. Monet created around twenty paintings of his willow tree between 1918 and 1919. In many of his water lily paintings, the tree is relegated to the background, or appears only in the pond’s reflection. The work offered at Sotheby’s, Saule pleureur, is one of the few times the artist used the willow as a painting’s sole subject. The warm autumnal shades of brown, red, and yellow that accent the work, particularly on its right side, give the painting its alternate title, L’Arbre de feu, or Tree of Fire. The willow occupies the entire canvas, which Sotheby’s specialists call “compactly scaled”. The painting shows how later generations of artists, particularly the Abstract Expressionists, drew on Monet’s later-life paintings despite their critical failings in the early twentieth century. However, Saule pleureur proved slightly less popular with buyers than anticipated on Thursday evening, achieving €7.9 million (or €9.68 million / $10.85 million w/p), slightly under its €9 million low estimate.

Finally, one of the evening’s few surprises took third place. Pierre Bonnard created the painting La cueillette des prunes around 1899. According to the artist’s catalogue raisonné compiled by Jean and Henry Dauberville, the painting is likely the central panel of a planned triptych. The two other panels likely meant to accompany this work are Enfants jouant avec une chèvre and La Cueillette des pommes, both kept at the Pola Museum of Art in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. The painting fits Bonnard’s tendency to feature gardens in his work. Sotheby’s specialists comment that the artist used gardens not only as a subject but as “a realm of memory as much as a pictorial laboratory in which light and colour undergo constant transformations.” Sotheby’s expected the work to sell for no more than €800K. However, strong interest in the painting prolonged bidding for over six minutes, pushing the price to more than double the high estimate. Eventually, auctioneer Aurélie Vandevoorde closed the lot at €1.95 million (or €2.48 million / $2.77 million w/p).

Usually, in single-collector blockbuster sales, very few lots achieve more than double their high estimates. However, with the Schlumberger collection, a small handful did just this. Apart from the Bonnard, the auction also included four works by the Post-Impressionist painter Pierre Laprade. All four were expected to sell for no more than €1,500 each. All of them sold for nearly triple that amount or more, with the biggest surprise being the final lot, a simple floral still life, which sold for €18K (or €23K / $25.8K w/p), or twelve times its high estimate.

Overall, the sale was a smashing success. Of the twenty-three available lots, seven sold within their estimates, giving Sotheby’s Paris a 30% accuracy rate. Only three lots (13%) sold below estimate, while an impressive thirteen lots (57%) sold above. Against a total pre-sale estimate range of €37.85 million and €51.9 million, the Schlumberger collection brought in €62.5 million. Of course, 68.8% of this came from Monet’s Iris. However, even if the painting had sold for just its €30 million high estimate, the sale would still have been a great success.

Early Edward Hopper Paintings Revealed as Copies

In his new biography on Edward Hopper, art historian Louis Shadwick reveals that six paintings created during the artist’s teenage years were actually copies of existing artworks rather than original compositions. This discovery challenges the long-held belief that Hopper showed exceptional artistic talent before receiving formal training.

The paintings in question date to the 1890s, when Hopper was a teenager living in Nyack, New York. This was before he attended art school, and for years served as evidence of his advanced artistic talents even before his formal education. Shadwick, however, has demonstrated that these six paintings are not original works by a young Hopper but were copies of works he found in art publications.

It took nearly six decades for scholars to identify these early works as copies, mainly because of their previous owner. The Reverend Arthayer Sanborn was a Baptist minister in Nyack who lived just down the road from the Hoppers. He claimed that Hopper and his wife, Josephine, frequently gifted him paintings and drawings in their later years. However, some Hopper specialists, like Gail Levin, dispute this, suggesting the minister may have taken advantage of the couple’s trust and stolen many works from their home. These six paintings were part of the Reverend’s collection. Research into the paintings had previously been muddled because of Sanborn giving them new titles that connect them to Hopper’s hometown. This suggests these early works are Hudson Valley landscapes. For example, Sanborn titled one painting The Old Ice Pond at Nyack, suggesting the scene could have been found near Hopper’s home. However, it is actually a copy of Bruce Crane’s Winter Sunset, likely depicting somewhere in Connecticut or on Long Island.

Shadwick’s research shows that these paintings were copied by a teenage Hopper from color prints published in The Art Interchange magazine. Shadwick identified that the copies are based on works by American painters like Edward Moran, John Francis Murphy, Fred Pansing, and others. The magazine printed reproductions of these artists’ work, accompanied by instructions for young artists on how to make copies themselves. Sanborn and others likely believed these paintings to be original compositions because Hopper had signed or initialed most of them. Shadwick describes this as Hopper’s “youthful pride in his earliest achievements”, and argues that these works were not meant to be original paintings. The new biography argues that these copies undermine some art-historical conceptions of Hopper’s early life, namely that he began his artistic endeavors during his adolescence “with essentially no instruction”. But while they may challenge the idea that Hopper was a sort of painting prodigy, they also reveal something new about the artist’s early life. These early copies tell scholars that Hopper engaged in “close study of contemporaneous painting from an early age,” finding particular interest in American tonalist painting. Shadwick claims that this more complete understanding of the artist’s early years offers scholars and admirers alike insight into “the much broader cultural fabric of Hopper’s youth”.

Shadwick first made these discoveries known in 2020, when he wrote an article in Burlington Magazine as a graduate student at London’s Courtauld Institute. At the time, he stated that these early paintings “require further investigation”, and that art historians must do more to grasp the “broad spectrum of styles and movements” that came to influence Hopper’s “eventual, mature conception of realism […]. Perhaps the apparent incongruity of these early influences can help to explain the unfixed, disparate and dislocated sense of Americanness that so haunts Hopper’s work.” And now, six years after this revelation, Shadwick’s book Edward Hopper: A Life is available from Yale University Press.

Stolen Renoirs Recovered

French police have recovered the two paintings stolen from the Musée Renoir in September.

On September 8th, two burglars broke into the Musée Renoir in the French Riviera town of Cagnes-sur-Mer. They hoped to steal four paintings that morning but made off with only two, leaving the others behind. The successfully stolen paintings were Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano and Jeune femme au puits, collectively worth around €9 million.

Police have arrested six men they believe are connected to the Renoir museum robbery. After the incident, investigators found DNA evidence at the scene, which helped identify two of the suspects. French authorities stated they hoped to locate and recover the missing paintings before making any arrests. However, the suspects forced them to act quicker than anticipated. On October 3rd, one of the two men was observed visiting the Fondation Maeght, a museum in the southern French town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Despite its small size, the museum is an important site for modern art admirers, featuring works by Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Alexander Calder. Police therefore suspected that the same people behind the Renoir robbery were planning to steal works from the Fondation Maeght. After searching a house west of Montpellier, police found the two missing Renoir paintings behind a false wall. While both works are slightly damaged, authorities say they are in good overall condition.

Many have commented that France, in particular, has seen an increase in robberies at museums and other cultural centers. Specifically, thefts of precious metals and gemstones from museums have been on the rise, most infamously the $102 million heist of the French crown jewels at the Louvre in 2025. However, other high-profile robberies across Europe have also occurred this year, including a €3.5 million diamond necklace taken from Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, four Renaissance-era Antonello da Messina paintings from a Sicilian museum, and a trove of Bronze Age artifacts from the Museum of Villena in Spain. And all of that was only in August.

Cagnes-sur-Mer mayor Bryan Masson called the Renoir paintings’ recovery “a source of immense joy and a great relief.” The Marseille Interdisciplinary Center for Heritage Conservation and Reservation has taken custody of the paintings. Its staff plans to collaborate with specialists from the Musée d’Orsay to examine the works thoroughly.

The Lichtenstein Collection at Sotheby’s

On Sunday, October 11, the Whitney Museum of American Art opened its long-awaited retrospective of American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. The previous week, Sotheby’s offered the public an early glimpse into the artist’s legacy through a sale of works from his private collection. Held at Sotheby’s New York on Wednesday, October 7th, the dedicated auction featured twenty-three lots drawn exclusively from Lichtenstein’s estate.

Two lots in particular were expected to lead the auction. First and foremost was one of Lichtenstein‘s studies for a planned painting called Interior with Painting of Nude, executed using marker and cut pieces of colored paper applied to paperboard with tape. Additionally, Sotheby’s featured a colored pencil study of the same subject. The works show Lichtenstein’s enduring fascination with the still life genre, as well as his growing interest in depicting the artist’s studio. Inspired by earlier works, such as Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio, Lichtenstein began creating interior paintings of an artist’s workspace, transforming the site of creation into the artistic subject itself. Upon the small round table, a cup of brushes and a painter’s palette hint at work that has been interrupted. Although the subject is not pulled from pulp magazines or comic books, the visual language points exclusively to Lichtenstein. The bright colors, crisp lines, and Ben-Day dots are hallmarks of the artist’s technique, while the more prominent use of non-primary colors like orange and green suggests a work from his later career. Estimated to sell for between $1 million and $1.5 million, the study drew strong interest from potential buyers, surpassing its high estimate with the hammer coming down at $1.85 million ($2.37 million w/p).

Next up was the monumental, twelve-foot-long work from the artist’s Entablature series. Created from 1971 to 1976, the series marked Lichtenstein’s move away from graphic art toward an exploration of historical concepts like architecture. The paintings are primarily inspired by friezes and cornices from ancient Greek and Roman buildings, yet executed with Lichtenstein’s polished approach. Sotheby’s specialists call the work “a meditation on the relationship between history and maternity, ornament and structure, and the handmade and the mechanically produced.” Though the source of inspiration differs greatly from his 1960s paintings, the Entablature series continues Lichtenstein’s fascination with image production and visual culture. This example from the series was estimated to sell for between $700K and $1 million, selling exactly at the low estimate ($896K w/p).

Rounding out the top three lots in the auction was the 1992 screenprint Water Lilies with Cloud. It serves as Lichtenstein’s tribute to Claude Monet. However, instead of the Impressionist master’s loose, soft brushstrokes, Lichtenstein presents the subject with his characteristic bold lines and vivid colors. The original painterly technique is replaced with a series of patterned segments to convey the movement and ephemerality of Monet’s original paintings. It evokes Monet while retaining Lichtenstein’s distinct style. With Sotheby’s specialists assigning the print a $400K to $600K range, Water Lilies with Cloud sold for its high estimate ($768K w/p).

Of the twenty-three available lots, ten sold within their estimates, giving Sotheby’s a 43% accuracy rate. An additional five lots (22%) sold for below their estimates, while seven lots (30%) sold for above. A single lot went unsold on Wednesday: a 1996 paper cut-out on board Landscape with Cliff (Study), which Sotheby’s estimated to sell for at least $300K. The lone unsold lot gave the auction a 96% sell-through rate. Against a total low estimate of $5.52 million, the twenty-three lots brought in $6.65 million, or $8.52 million w/p. This brief auction served as a welcome introduction to the series of modern and contemporary art sales that followed later in the week.

The Met Reexamines Krasner & Pollock

In recent years, museum curators and the general public have become increasingly aware that the partners of celebrated artists were often accomplished artists in their own right. Most notably, Pablo Picasso’s partner Françoise Gilot has experienced a museum and art market resurgence. But few women deserve this sort of recognition, however belated, more than Lee Krasner. On Sunday, October 4th, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its latest major exhibit, Krasner & Pollock: Past Continuous. The show serves not only as a condensed retrospective of both Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s work, but also explores their marriage and how each artist’s work was influenced by the other.

In the first major New York museum exhibition dedicated to either artist in more than two decades, Krasner & Pollock: Past Continuous presents their shared story in roughly chronological fashion, starting with their respective backgrounds. Krasner, the daughter of Jewish immigrants to New York, was greatly influenced by modernist painting coming out of Europe. She studied under Hans Hofmann, who influenced the later abstract expressionist movement by synthesizing the styles and techniques of painters like Cézanne and Kandinsky.

In the opening galleries, curators placed some of Krasner’s early abstract figure paintings directly across from examples of Pollock’s early work. The arrangement highlights the differences in their backgrounds and artistic education. Pollock was born in Wyoming and grew up primarily in California. Rather than drawing heavily from German and French modernists, he was influenced by the energy and rhythms of Thomas Hart Benton’s American Regionalist paintings, as well as the monumental, socially conscious works of Mexico’s muralist movement, led by artists such as Diego Rivera. According to the Met’s curators, Pollock and Krasner represent “two parallel art-historical tracks within the United States that needed to collide and cross-pollinate to create what became known as Abstract Expressionism.”

The galleries that follow explore how the two influenced one another throughout their careers. The Met shows that Pollock was not alone in experimenting with the drip technique. Alongside some of his earlier examples of “action painting”, as he called it, the exhibition makes sure to include some of Krasner’s own drip paintings, like an untitled 1947 work on loan from the Whitney Museum. By holding a brush just above the canvas and allowing the paint to fall, Krasner created densely layered patterns that scholars often describe as webs. Her approach differs considerably from Pollock’s, whose drip paintings are characterized by large splashes of paint and sweeping gestures across enormous canvases.

Other works reveal how both artists began incorporating everyday objects into their art. Pollock’s Full Fathom Five, one of the artist’s first drip paintings, contains nails, coins, buttons, and other debris trapped beneath layers of paint. These objects alter the painting’s texture and surface, making the work as much a physical object as an image. Met curators highlight this, noting the similarities with Krasner’s Mosaic Table on display nearby. Created around the same time as Full Fathom Five, she used coins, costume jewelry, keys, and the bottoms of glass bottles, arranging them within an old wagon wheel and pouring concrete over the top. Seen together, the two works demonstrate how both artists transformed ordinary materials into something entirely new.

The exhibition also emphasizes what made Krasner’s work distinct, particularly in its final galleries, which focus increasingly on the paintings she produced after Pollock’s death in 1956. These striking works show inspiration from natural imagery and floral motifs. Their color combinations and sweeping forms showcase Krasner’s dialogues with other artists such as Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Henri Matisse. Her canvases also grew much larger, a nod to the monumental scale of her late husband’s work. Yet, the exhibition also included some of Pollock’s other work that appears inspired by the more vibrant natural imagery Krasner used for decades. The bright colors and looser brushwork in Easter and the Totem from 1953 offer a particularly compelling example of Pollock continuing to look toward Krasner, even as his drip paintings gained widespread recognition.

Throughout the exhibition, the curators often avoid taking a position on which artist first employed a particular technique. For visitors seeking a clear chronology of their artistic development, this approach may be frustrating. But it may also be the exhibition’s greatest strength. Attempting to establish who first used a specific technique risks reducing Krasner and Pollock’s artistic relationship to a simple call-and-response, casting one artist as the innovator and the other as the imitator. Instead, by showing how their work developed along similar paths, both independently and together, the Met offers a more fluid understanding of artistic evolution that recognizes the significance and originality of both artists.

Ultimately, the exhibition makes a compelling case that Pollock and Krasner cannot be fully understood when viewed in isolation from one another. Pollock might not have become the household name we know today without Krasner’s influence and support. And Krasner’s artistic development in the decades after her husband’s death cannot be separated entirely from the fourteen years they spent together. Rather than diminishing either artist’s achievements, Krasner & Pollock: Past Continuous demonstrates how their relationship helped shape two distinct but deeply interconnected artistic legacies.

Krasner & Pollock: Past Continuous will be on display through January 31, 2027.

The David Hockney Sale at Phillips London

Every September since 2022, Phillips London has hosted a small sale dedicated exclusively to the works of British artist David Hockney. They have consistently been among the auction house’s most successful sales, given the artist’s enduring popularity over the decades. However, the most recent edition on September 19th marked the first of these sales following Hockney’s death on June 11, 2026. The death of a living artist can sometimes drastically affect their market. However, in the months following his passing, demand for Hockney’s work seems as strong as ever.

The expected star of the sale was the large print Autour de la maison, été. Depicting the Normandy countryside, the inkjet print is made from a single, twelve-meter-long sheet of paper, making it Hockney’s largest editioned print. The artist said that he was inspired by Chinese paintings done on long scrolls on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1980s. Phillips specialists have also drawn comparisons to the Bayeux Tapestry, which is typically on display just 60 kilometers west of Hockney’s French studio (however, it is currently in London at the British Museum in a highly publicized exhibition). Estimated to sell for at least £150K, Autour de la maison, été sold for its low estimate (or £193.5K / $259.2K w/p).

Next up was Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon, and a Blue Wash, one of a series of forty-eight completed in 1980. The central subject, a diving board hanging over a rippling swimming pool, is one of Hockney’s most recognizable images. Many of his paintings and print series, most famously Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), feature swimming pools as ultimate symbols of twentieth-century prosperity. The Lithographic Water series, however, was more of a technical exercise for Hockney. Phillips specialists assigned an estimate range of £100K to £150K, with the hammer coming down at £120K (or £154.8K / $207.4K w/p).

And finally, two lots took third place at Phillips on Saturday. The first was the lithograph An Image of Gregory, which comes from Hockney’s Moving Focus print series. Completed in 1985, the Moving Focus series was Hockney’s attempt to inject elements of cubism into his work, experimenting with space and perspective. The present work is a portrait of the artist’s friend Gregory Evans, shown sitting cross-legged in a pinstripe suit. Similar to Picasso’s portraiture, Evans is shown simultaneously looking straight at the viewer and in profile. The next lot, Tyler Dining Room, was made as part of the same series, with this example exploring “spatial complexity”. Against respective high estimates of £70K and £60K, both lots exceeded Phillips predictions and sold for £110K each (or £141.9K / $190.1K w/p).

Of the seventy-seven available lots, eleven sold for more than double their high estimates, constituting 14.2% of the sale. The most notable examples were the 1993 lithograph Blue Hang Cliff (est. £10K to £15K; £38K hammer), the 1963 etching The Gospel Singing (Good Singing) Madison Square Garden (est. £4K to £6K; £14K hammer), and the 1995 inkjet print First Detail, Snails Space, March 25th 1995 (est. £7K to £9K; £20K hammer).

In the past, the Hockney sales at Phillips have always done very well. Saturday’s sale brought in a total of £1.56 million against a pre-sale high estimate of £1.46 million. This is consistent with previous editions. The 2026 edition was also very consistent in other categories. Of the seventy-seven available lots, twenty sold within their estimates, giving Phillips a 26% accuracy rate. An additional nine lots (12%) sold below their estimates, while an astounding forty-six lots (60%) sold above. With only two lots going unsold, Phillips achieved a 97% sell-through rate. This is not unusual for the David Hockney sales at Phillips. Last year’s sale saw 79% of lots sell above estimate and a 95% sell-through rate. These sales’ successes are not only a testament to Hockney’s significance during his lifetime but also to his impact on the market and subsequent generations of artists.

ON THE CALENDAR

Upcoming Shows & Exhibitions

NOW – NOV 30

Field Notes: New Paintings by Ben Bauer

Rehs Contemporary · 20 West 55th Street, 5th Floor

FROM NOV 20

Small Works: Paintings Made for Giving

Online, with a selection on view at the gallery

JAN 6–10, 2027

LA Art Show

Los Angeles Convention Center

FEB 11–16, 2027

Palm Beach Show

Palm Beach County Convention Center

MAY 2027

Save the Date: Amanda Greive Solo Exhibition

Rehs Contemporary · 20 West 55th Street, 5th Floor

The Rehs Family © Rehs Galleries, Inc., New York – November 2026