Moments from Christie’s Auction (2025)

Christie's 2025 evening sales in New York kept the market's attention on blue-chip modern art even as the broader auction world cooled from its post-pandemic highs, with a Piet Mondrian composition fetching $47.6 million as the top lot of a pair of sales that brought in roughly $489 million between them, and a Marlene Dumas canvas separately setting a new auction record for a living female artist. Together the results were read across the art press as a signal that, whatever softness had crept into the wider market, demand for the most historically secure names, Mondrian's grid paintings above all, remained essentially untouched.

There's a neat thread here if you've also spent time with Mondrian's actual working context: the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam holds one of the deepest collections of Dutch De Stijl material anywhere, so seeing a Mondrian sell for tens of millions in a Christie's saleroom lands differently once you've stood in front of the paintings that got him there, austere grids of black lines and primary color blocks that were, in his own lifetime, considered a genuinely radical rejection of representation rather than a blue-chip investment.