How to Read Christie's November 2026 Evening Sales

Christie's has put a $60–80 million estimate on Gustav Klimt's Litzlbergkeller, and ARTnews's headline says the painting is "Guaranteed to Sell". It leads the 20th Century Evening Sale at Rockefeller Center on Tuesday 17 November, and it is on view there from Saturday 7 November. That leaves three questions to settle before the night: what an estimate on a guaranteed lot actually promises, what the winning bidder will really pay, and what is worth checking in the galleries first.

This guide is the companion to our guide to the Sotheby's and Phillips sales, which did not cover Christie's, and one piece of that guide's arithmetic now carries over. USA Art News reported on 3 September that Christie's new fee structure took effect on 1 September: buyers pay 28 per cent of the hammer price up to $2 million, 22 per cent from $2 million to $8 million and 15 per cent above that. MyArtBroker's analysis notes that the change brings Christie's into line with the structure Sotheby's adopted in February, so the fee sections of the Sotheby's guide now apply to Christie's lots as well.

The calendar: six evening sales in four nights

All times are Eastern.

• Saturday 7 November. Christie's previews open at Rockefeller Center for both of its evening sales.
• Monday 16 November. Sotheby's Now & Contemporary Evening Auction, 7pm.
• Tuesday 17 November. Phillips's Modern & Contemporary Evening Sale at 4:30pm, then Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale, listed at 6:30pm. The Klimt and the Clive Davis works are in the Christie's sale.
• Wednesday 18 November. Sotheby's Blaquier-Arrieta sale at 6pm and its Modern Evening Auction at 7pm.
• Thursday 19 November. Christie's 21st Century Evening Sale, listed at 7pm and billed by The Art Quarterly as the Sonnabend Collection sale.

That is six evening sales in four nights, with two on the Tuesday. Artlyst and Anadolu both name 17 November for the 20th Century Evening Sale, and USA Art News gives the same date for the Klimt's evening sale. Anadolu says Christie's announced the sale on Monday, and Artlyst's report is dated 26 October. The 7 November start of viewing appears in Artlyst, Anadolu and The Art Quarterly's listings. The 19 November date and both Christie's start times come from The Art Quarterly's table alone, which also dates the Phillips sale a day late — Phillips's own sale page gives Tuesday 17 November. Treat the 19 November date and those two times as provisional, and confirm them with Christie's before you plan an evening around them.

What is on the block

The Klimt. Litzlbergkeller (1915–16) shows a brewery and inn on the north shore of the Attersee, the Austrian lake where Klimt took annual summer holidays with the Flöge family from the late 1890s. Landscapes were, Wikipedia notes, the only genre besides figure painting that seriously interested him. The banker Otto Primavesi commissioned this one, Türkiye Today reports, and it later belonged to the dealer Serge Sabarsky — born in Vienna in 1912, in New York from 1939, and the planner, with Ronald Lauder, of the Neue Galerie before his death in 1996, according to Wikipedia. In May 1997 the painting sold at Sotheby's New York for $14.7 million, then a Klimt auction record, to the family of its current owner, luxe.digital reports. Adjusted for inflation, the same article says, that price is roughly $30.9 million, so the low estimate is almost double it in today's money.

Christie's has said how it wants the picture read. According to luxe.digital, the house notes that Klimt built the composition partly from a telescope study made from the opposite shore and partly from postcard views. Giovanna Bertazzoni, chairman of Christie's Europe, called the work inestimable, Artlyst reports.

The Davis works. Eight works from the collection of Clive Davis headline the same sale, with a collective estimate above $35 million, the Los Angeles Times reports. They include Andy Warhol's portraits of David Hockney and Aretha Franklin and Hockney's landscape Hawthorne Blossom, Woldgate No. 4. Christie's had released no individual estimates when the group was announced, USA Art News noted, so check the lot pages for any that have appeared since.

Davis was born in Brooklyn in 1932, was president of Columbia Records from 1967 to 1973, founded Arista in 1974 and led it until 2000, and died on 22 June at 94, Wikipedia records. He signed Aretha Franklin to Arista in 1980, after she left Atlantic, and her 1985 album Who's Zoomin' Who? gave her top-ten hits including "Freeway of Love", her Wikipedia entry says. USA Art News quotes Christie's Sara Friedlander: "Clive Davis had the unique ability to recognize and cultivate great talent in its most nascent phase." It quotes Davis himself: "I am extraordinarily passionate about art, and I am always learning about it." It adds that Hockney had painted Davis's portrait. Warhol made record covers as well as portraits, and one of the best-known is the subject of Andy Warhol's Banana and When Pop Art Became Music Packaging.

The Sonnabend collection. The main group from the collection of Antonio Homem Sonnabend goes to the 21st Century Evening Sale and the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale, and Finestre sull'Arte puts the whole collection at more than $50 million. It is being sold in stages — London in October, an evening sale of prints and multiples in New York and a Paris evening sale, then the main group in November's Marquee Week, with more dates in December and after, exibart reports. The reports illustrate Roy Lichtenstein's Large Spool, Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can (Turkey Noodle), Robert Rauschenberg's Untitled Collage with Cuff, Mario Schifano's A De Chirico and Jasper Johns's Numbers, and they do not say which sale each work belongs to, so check the lot pages.

Homem, Ileana Sonnabend's longtime collaborator, died in March at 86. He joined her Paris gallery in 1968, helped open the New York gallery in 1971, founded the Sonnabend Collection Foundation in 2009 and helped open a museum for the collection in Mantua in 2025, USA Art News recorded. He always said the collection was "an autobiography and an auto-portrait of Ileana". She was born Ileana Schapira in Bucharest in 1914, married the dealer Leo Castelli in the early 1930s and later Michael Sonnabend, and opened her Paris gallery in the early 1960s. Wikipedia says she introduced Warhol, Lichtenstein and others there and helped establish a European market for their work. In 1966 she sold Lichtenstein's Whaam! to the Tate: her asking price of £4,665 was negotiated down to £3,940, over the objections of trustees including Barbara Hepworth, Andrew Forge and Herbert Read, Wikipedia's entry on the painting records. The Whitney's Roy Lichtenstein: Like New runs until 10 May 2027 and is a useful place to see the artist in context before you judge any Lichtenstein from this collection.

Reading a lot page: seven checks

Open the lot page, or the catalogue entry in the galleries, and run these checks in order.

1. Which sale, which night. The Klimt and the Davis works are in the 17 November sale. The main Sonnabend group goes to the 21st Century Evening Sale, listed for 19 November, and the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale; other parts of that collection are being sold in other cities and months. A lot you read about last month may be in a different room from the one you plan to watch.
2. The estimate. It forecasts the hammer price and leaves out fees. Where a figure is missing — the Davis works had no individual estimates when they were announced — wait for the house to publish one. A collective total says nothing about any single lot.
3. The symbol beside the lot number. In 2015 Hyperallergic reported that lots with third-party guarantors are usually marked by a symbol in the catalogue, and that "Christie's uses a diamond". That year The Art Newspaper reported that lots in which only the auction house "has a direct financial interest" are "marked in the catalogue with a small black circle". Apollo's example, a Canaletto that sold at Christie's London in June 2025, carried a diamond on its online listing. Use the catalogue's own key to symbols for the current meanings.
4. The provenance. This is the list of owners, with dates. You want a chain without unexplained gaps, and a specialist who can say what any gap was. The reports on the Klimt name three points on its chain — the commissioner, Otto Primavesi; the dealer Serge Sabarsky; and the 1997 Sotheby's sale to the family of the current owner — and do not name the owners in between, so that is the first question to put to the specialist.
5. Exhibition history and literature. This shows who has vouched for the picture by showing or publishing it. Türkiye Today says the Klimt has spent recent years on long-term loan to the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
6. The lot essay. Read it as the house's argument for the picture, and notice what it leaves out. The telescope study and the postcards are the kind of detail you can carry into the gallery and check against the canvas.
7. Condition. Ask for the condition report at the preview, then compare it with the work itself — the edges, the back and the surface in raking light.

Working out the number

An estimate forecasts the hammer price. What the buyer pays is the hammer plus the premium, and on the scale in force since 1 September that comes to:

Above an $8 million hammer, the sum is simple: the buyer pays 1.15 times the hammer price plus $680,000. At the Klimt's estimate of $60–80 million, the winning bidder would pay between $69.68 million and $92.68 million. For scale, Wikipedia gives $104.6 million for Birch Forest (1903), the Klimt landscape Christie's sold in November 2022, and $236.4 million for Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16), which Sotheby's sold on 18 November 2025. Even at the high estimate, the Litzlbergkeller's total of $92.68 million would sit about $11.9 million below the Birch Forest figure, and the hammer would have to reach about $90.4 million to match it. That is a calculation from reported figures, not a prediction or a Christie's statement; a record total also includes the fees of its day, the house's conditions of sale govern, and taxes and other charges come on top.

Set your own limit the other way round. A $1 million all-in budget means a hammer ceiling of $781,250. A $5 million budget means $4 million, and a $10 million budget means about $8.1 million. The bid you give the auctioneer, a telephone representative or an absentee form is the hammer figure, not your total.

The scale has risen in steps, and a Christie's premium quoted before September is out of date. The ladder runs:

• 1975: Christie's introduces a buyer's premium of 10 per cent, and Sotheby's follows, according to the economists Orley Ashenfelter and Kathryn Graddy, whom the Sotheby's guide cites.
• 2008–2013: 25 per cent on the first $50,000, 20 per cent up to $1 million and 12 per cent on the rest, Wikipedia says.
• From 2013: 25 per cent on the first $75,000, 20 per cent up to $1.5 million and 12 per cent on the rest.
• 2023: 26 per cent up to $1 million, 21 per cent up to $6 million and 15 per cent above.
• September 2025: 27 per cent up to $1.5 million, 22 per cent up to $8 million and 15 per cent above, as The Art Newspaper reported in February.
• 1 September 2026: 28 per cent up to $2 million, 22 per cent up to $8 million and 15 per cent above.

By this arithmetic, any hammer of $2 million or more costs exactly $45,000 more under the new scale than under the September 2025 one.

Guarantees: the diamond and the circle

The Klimt is reported as guaranteed — ARTnews's headline says so, and luxe.digital reports that the work carries a guarantee — and that changes how you read the night. Artnet's glossary defines a guarantee as "the guaranteed amount a seller is promised, regardless of whether their lot sells or flops", and says guarantees "are made by auction houses and/or third parties who are willing to acquire a piece at a given price".

Christie's did not always offer them. In 1990, Wikipedia says, the company "reversed a long-standing policy and guaranteed a minimum price for a collection of artworks". At its 13 May 2015 sale, Charlotte Burns reported for The Art Newspaper, 50 of the 85 works were marked as guaranteed. In May 2026, as the Sotheby's guide notes, the Newhouse collection sale was backed entirely by third-party guarantees. What that means for you:

• A guaranteed lot sells. If the room is quiet, the guarantor takes the work at the agreed price, so the result tells you less about demand than a result without a guarantee.
• A low hammer is weak evidence. A hammer at or near the low estimate may mean the guarantor won the lot. The agreed price is secret, and Apollo says it is "usually at the low estimate or a bit below".
• Check which kind it is. The 2015 reports above tie the circle to a lot in which the house itself has a direct financial interest, and the diamond to a third-party guarantee. Ask a specialist what a lot you care about carries.
• Compare lots without symbols. As far as the catalogue discloses, a lot with no mark is the cleaner test of what the room will pay, because no one was committed to buy it in advance.

Mistakes and what they cost

These five mistakes are the easiest to make with the numbers in this guide.

At the preview

Christie's described its 2024 November preview in its guide to the sales, as reproduced by Miami Living Magazine: "The exhibition is free and open to the public from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM through 22 November." The 2026 hours were not in the sources checked for this guide, so confirm them before you go.

The galleries have a longer history than most visitors know. James Christie conducted the first sale in London on 5 December 1766, and the firm has been in King Street, St James's, since 1823, Wikipedia says. Its first international branch opened in 1977 in the grand ballroom of Delmonico's Hotel on Park Avenue. In 1997 it took a lease on about 300,000 square feet at Rockefeller Center for $40 million, and in 1998 François Pinault's Groupe Artémis began buying the company, in a deal that valued it at $1.2 billion. In August 2024, Commercial Observer reported, Christie's renewed its 400,000 square feet at 20 Rockefeller Plaza for another 25 years. The CBRE broker Mary Ann Tighe called it "a 50-year residency at the Center, from 1999 through 2049" and said Christie's "will be redesigning and rebuilding their entire premises". The renovated West Galleries were unveiled at May Marquee Week 2026 with new lighting and flooring, ArtDependence reports, and the renovation, which includes a new saleroom, is due to be finished in fall 2027. Part of what you see in November is therefore new.

Once you are in the rooms:

1. Start with the lots you came for, then walk the rest. Context is the point of a preview: a Klimt landscape reads differently once you have seen what hangs around it.
2. Look at the object, not only the image. Check the edges, and ask to see the back, where labels and stamps often record where the picture has been.
3. Ask for the condition report, and ask the specialist what, if anything, has been restored.
4. Compare across the sale. The Davis group gives you two Warhol portraits to set beside each other. If Sonnabend works by Lichtenstein and Warhol are on view too, set those side by side: they are the two Pop artists Ileana Sonnabend introduced in Paris.
5. Slow down. How to Experience Art Exhibitions Meaningfully covers pacing and attention, which matter in a crowded preview.

On the night

In 2024 Christie's said its sales would be livestreamed on YouTube and Instagram, and that to attend in person "tickets are required", with seats in the sale room "reserved for select registered bidders". Check whether the same rules apply in 2026. The Collector's Guide to Art Fairs and Auctions covers the strategy and etiquette of bidding.

On Tuesday 17 November two houses sell in one evening: Phillips at 4:30pm and Christie's at a listed 6:30pm. If you plan to follow both, leave room for the first sale to run over, and confirm the Christie's start time first.

Before the first lot, write a four-column sheet: lot, estimate, symbol, and your hammer ceiling. As each lot sells, add the hammer price — Artnet's glossary defines it as "the amount of money that an artwork sells for in the salesroom, before fees" — and, afterwards, the total. Mark the guaranteed lots. By the end you will have a record of which results were tests of demand and which were not.

A sale can also be quick. CNN reports, as the Sotheby's guide notes, that Sotheby's Blaquier-Arrieta sale is expected to bring $450 million or more in under an hour across 12 works.

Reading the results

Three habits make the results readable.

• Check which number you are reading. In May 2026, according to The Art Newspaper, Christie's two New York evening sales made $950 million at hammer and $1.1 billion with fees, against pre-sale expectations of $823 million to $1 billion. A headline total can be either, and the Sotheby's guide applies the same test to Sotheby's and Phillips.
• Compare like with like. Estimates are hammer forecasts, so line them up against hammer prices. Records and "what it cost" figures include fees, so line those up against the "Buyer pays" column of the fee table earlier in this guide.
• Read the guaranteed lots separately. Where a lot carried a circle or a diamond, a sale at the low estimate is the guarantee doing its job, not necessarily a verdict on the picture.