The November 2026 New York Auctions: Dates, Estimates and What the Numbers Mean

Sotheby's has a Cézanne in its 18 November sale at a reported estimate of about $120 million, and AP reports that the house expects it, and a van Gogh in the same sale, to set auction records for the artists. The record for a Cézanne is about $138 million (La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, sold at Christie's in 2022, per CNN). That isn't a contradiction, and the reason is the most useful thing to understand before the New York evening sales begin: an estimate predicts the hammer price, and a record is what the buyer paid once fees were added.

This guide covers the Sotheby's and Phillips evening sales; Christie's sales aren't covered here.

The dates

All times are Eastern. Sotheby's holds two evening sales an hour apart on 18 November, and shows its sales at 945 Madison Avenue (Monday to Saturday 10am–5pm, Sunday 1pm–5pm), according to its New York sales page. Phillips shows its evening sale at 432 Park Avenue over the same dates (Monday to Saturday 10am–5pm, Sunday noon–5pm, closing at noon on Monday 16 November). Between them, the sales in this guide make four evening sales in three nights. If you're going to a viewing first, how to experience art exhibitions is a useful companion.

What's on the block

Sotheby's, Wednesday 18 November. Legendary: The Blaquier-Arrieta Collection Evening Auction offers a dozen Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that AP describes as largely unseen for half a century, assembled by the late Argentine collectors Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier and sold by their children. AP says the group is collectively valued at almost half a billion US dollars. The lead lots are van Gogh's Châtaigniers en fleurs, painted at Auvers in 1890, and Cézanne's Arlequin (1888–90), one of four portraits of the artist's son as a Harlequin — the other three are in major museums, AP notes. Sotheby's lists both as "estimate upon request"; AP reports about $180 million for the van Gogh and $120 million for the Cézanne. Below them sit Pissarro's La Place du Théâtre-Français et l'avenue de l'Opéra, soleil d'après-midi en hiver (1898) at $30–40 million, Renoir's En Canot (Jeune fille à la barque) (1877) at $25–35 million and Monet's Le Jardin des Tuileries (1876) at $15–20 million.

The Modern Evening Auction follows an hour later, with works including Degas's Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes) ($10–15 million) and Signac's Collioure. Les Balancelles (Opus 167) ($12–18 million).

Sotheby's, Monday 16 November. The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction includes Lichtenstein's Reflections on "Painter and Model" ($20–30 million), Francis Bacon's Self-Portrait ($10–15 million) and Yayoi Kusama's No. 3P.B. ($10–15 million).

Phillips, Tuesday 17 November. The Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale is led by Amedeo Modigliani's Tête (1911–12), carved from a single block of limestone and nearly 30 inches tall, estimated at $28–35 million. Phillips says it is being offered at auction for the first time, after about half a century in one private collection, and that it is one of only a handful of Modigliani's stone heads still outside museums. The second-highest estimate is for David Hockney's David, Celia, Stephen and Ian, London 1982 ($10–15 million).

Where the Blaquier-Arrieta pictures come from

Few people outside the family saw the collection. CNN quotes Philip Hook, a former senior director at Sotheby's, saying that the Blaquiers never lent to museums and that "no one really knew" what it held.

Carlos Pedro Blaquier was president of a sugar mill and belonged to one of Argentina's most powerful families; Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier sat on international museum committees and guided what they bought. Much of it came from the Lefevre Gallery in London, where the couple travelled in summer to buy directly — CNN calls Lefevre "a major player in Impressionist and Modern art until its closure at the turn of the 21st century." Both lead lots have been in the family since the 1970s; the Cézanne was sold to the Blaquiers in 1975. Nelly died in 2020 and Carlos in 2023, and their children are selling. Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby's Europe, calls the group "a mini Musée d'Orsay." CNN also reports that for the last decade of his life Carlos Blaquier was investigated for crimes against humanity, for allegedly detaining activists during Argentina's military dictatorship of 1976–83; he never stood trial before his death, according to his obituary in La Nación, and CNN quotes a Sotheby's spokesperson saying that "he was never convicted and always maintained his innocence."

The Cézanne. Arlequin belongs to the pictures Cézanne painted in 1888–90 with his son Paul as Harlequin. The National Gallery of Art in Washington owns another Harlequin from those years and catalogues it as one of four costume pieces — a Mardi Gras showing Harlequin and Pierrot, and three variants on Harlequin alone. Paul posed for the figure, and Cézanne replaced its face with an impassive mask, which the museum calls "a further, more abstract stage." CNN reports that the Blaquier picture is the only one of the four not in a museum; it passed through the dealers Ambroise Vollard, Paul Durand-Ruel and Paul Rosenberg and has been shown at MoMA, the Tate and the Art Institute of Chicago. The Washington picture also passed through Vollard before the collector Paul Mellon bought it in 1967 and gave it to the museum in 1985.

The van Gogh. Van Gogh painted the chestnut trees at Auvers-sur-Oise in the last two months of his life, just after leaving the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where he had admitted himself voluntarily and stayed for a year. CNN reports that Sotheby's notes the "vigor" and "optimism" of that final period. The record for a van Gogh is Verger avec cyprès, which made $117 million at Christie's in 2022; at the reported $180 million hammer, the buyer's total for this picture (worked out below) would be more than $90 million above it.

A hotel window and a block of limestone

Pissarro's rented room. The Pissarro comes from the winter series he painted from a hotel. On 15 December 1897 he wrote that he had "found a room in the Grand Hôtel du Louvre which has a superb view over the avenue de l'Opéra," and over the following months he painted fifteen views of the surrounding avenues, according to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum adds that Paris put him near his doctor, who was treating a persistent eye infection, and that the series records how snow, rain, mist and fog changed the city. The lot's title, soleil d'après-midi en hiver, says which weather this one caught. The colour chemistry behind pictures like these is covered in Impressionism and the Chemistry of Light.

Modigliani's stone. Tête comes from the short stretch when Modigliani carved instead of painting. The Pearlman Collection's entry on one of his heads dates his focus on sculpture to 1909–14 and says he was inspired in part by meeting Constantin Brancusi; in 1912 he exhibited seven heads together at the Salon d'Automne under the title Têtes, ensemble décoratif, and around 1914 he stopped, which the entry links to health concerns and other practicalities. Phillips counts about 28 stone sculptures from his lifetime, the vast majority now in museums including MoMA, the Guggenheim, Tate and the Centre Pompidou — which is how Tête comes to be one of only a handful still outside them. Phillips's article on the lot ties the heads to Modigliani's unrealised vision of a "temple of beauty."

The night the gala sale was invented

The black-tie evening sale is younger than most of the pictures sold in it. Sotheby's own history credits the gala sale to the night of 15 October 1958 at its New Bond Street galleries in London, when Peter Wilson, who chaired the house from 1958 to 1980, took the rostrum at 9:35pm to sell seven Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings from the collection of the New York banker Jakob Goldschmidt. They included Manet's La Rue Mosnier aux Drapeaux, Cézanne's Le Garçon au gilet rouge and Van Gogh's Jardin public à Arles, which flew past its high estimate. Billed as the "first black tie gala auction," the sale was over in 21 minutes, according to Sotheby's account, and the auction record was broken twice in one night.

The room held Anthony Quinn, W. Somerset Maugham, Margot Fonteyn and Kirk Douglas, who had played Van Gogh in Lust for Life two years earlier. TV crews and photographers covered the evening, and outside, crowds queued until police held them back. Sotheby's says the evening would "forever alter the landscape of art sales." Sixty-eight years later the same house is again selling a collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pictures at night: CNN reports that the Blaquier-Arrieta sale is expected to bring $450 million or more in under an hour across 12 works.

Four ways to bid

Sotheby's lists four, in its bidding help:

1. In the room. You signal the auctioneer with a hand or a paddle.
2. By telephone. A Sotheby's representative calls you as your lot comes up and relays your bids.
3. Online. You must register for an account beforehand, and you can bid before and during the sale.
4. Absentee. You leave a maximum bid before the auction begins, and Sotheby's bids for you up to that figure. If someone outbids you, you lose the lot; if you win, you're notified after the sale.

Whichever you choose, Sotheby's says to complete your account profile 24 hours before the auction "to be eligible to bid," and you register for each sale separately through its "Register to Bid" button. For the 6pm Blaquier-Arrieta sale, that means 6pm on Tuesday 17 November — treat it as the latest possible moment, not the target. At Phillips, online bidding requires approval and may need additional documentation, according to the sale page, which directs in-person, absentee and telephone bidders to bidsnewyork@phillips.com and says admission is by ticket only.

What the premium does

An estimate is a range for the hammer price, the last bid before the auctioneer's hammer falls. The buyer pays that plus a premium on a sliding scale. In The Art Newspaper's report of Sotheby's change on 13 February 2026, New York buyers pay 28% on the hammer price up to $2 million, 22% from $2 million to $8 million and 15% above $8 million, each rate applied band by band.

For a $120 million hammer price that is $0.56 million on the first $2 million, $1.32 million on the next $6 million and $16.8 million on the remaining $112 million: $18.68 million in fees and a total of $138.68 million. That solves the Cézanne puzzle. At a hammer price near its reported estimate, the buyer's total would land just above the roughly $138 million record. It's a calculation from reported figures, not a Sotheby's statement, and the house's terms of sale for the evening govern. Phillips publishes its own scale, so these totals don't apply to its lots.

Phillips also lets you lower yours. The sale page carries the promotion "Priority Bidding is here! Secure a lower Buyer's Premium," and the house's explainer sets out the rules:

• Timing: the bid must be placed at least 48 hours before the auction starts — for the 4:30pm evening sale on 17 November, that is 4:30pm on Sunday 15 November.
• Level: it must be at or above the lot's published low estimate.
• Payoff: the reduced premium applies only if you win, whether on that bid or on a higher live bid.
• Limits: a Priority Bid can't be cancelled, and the offer covers Phillips's live auctions in every category except Watches, not timed online-only sales.

Phillips's headline says you can "save up to 4%"; the reduced rates themselves sit in a PDF linked from the explainer.

When the houses fixed their fees

The buyer's premium is younger than the houses that charge it. Christie's introduced one of 10% in 1975 and, in the words of economists Orley Ashenfelter and Kathryn Graddy, "Sotheby's immediately followed suit." Sellers pay the house too, and in the 1990s the two houses set that price together. The sequence below comes from Ashenfelter and Graddy's paper, "Anatomy of the Rise and Fall of a Price-Fixing Conspiracy: Auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's" (Journal of Competition Law and Economics, 2005):

• March–April 1995: Christie's announces a fixed, non-negotiable sliding-scale commission for sellers, effective 1 September; Sotheby's announces very similar rates on 13 April, effective 5 September.
• Until early 1997: both houses hold to the scales and don't negotiate with sellers.
• May 1997: the US Justice Department issues subpoenas to Sotheby's, Christie's and several dealers.
• Late 1999–January 2000: Christie's lawyers uncover evidence of the conspiracy, and Christie's gets amnesty on condition that it cooperates.
• October 2000: Diana "Dede" Brooks, Sotheby's former chief executive, pleads guilty to one felony count of price-fixing; in April 2002 she is sentenced to three years' probation, 1,000 hours of community service and a $350,000 fine.
• September 2001: Sotheby's agrees to plead guilty to conspiring with Christie's to fix sellers' commissions and to pay a $45 million fine over five years, while maintaining its innocence on buyers' premiums; each house agrees to pay $256 million in a civil settlement.

Alfred Taubman, who had chaired Sotheby's, was convicted of price-fixing and sentenced to a year in jail and a $7.5 million fine; the paper says he spent nearly a year in jail. The scandal concerned the seller's side of the ledger; the tiers earlier in this guide are the buyer's.

Six lots, two numbers

Totals use the tiers above and leave out taxes and any other charges.

Read the right-hand column against the middle one and the tiering shows: the premium adds a little over 15% to the van Gogh and Cézanne at their reported estimates, but nearly 20% to the Monet at its low estimate, because a cheaper lot has more of its price inside the 28% and 22% bands. Run the Cézanne backwards and a hammer of roughly $119.2 million is enough to pass the $137.7 million record — under $1 million below its reported estimate. Both figures are calculations from reported numbers, not predictions.

Guarantees: the third number

A guarantee is the number the catalogue rarely prints. In Apollo's words, it means that someone — a third-party buyer or the house itself — "will buy a work for an agreed but secret price if there are no bids or the work doesn't meet the reserve." It is sometimes called an irrevocable bid, and the price is "usually at the low estimate or a bit below." In exchange for that security, sellers "may have to give away some of this 'upside' to the guarantor, typically 15 to 20 per cent, according to insiders."

The practice has gone from tool to default. ArtTactic's Lindsay Dewar says that "nearly 73 per cent of lots by hammer value were guaranteed at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips's" in the first half of 2025 in post-war and contemporary evening sales, a record, and Apollo adds that "72 per cent of works by hammer value were guaranteed in the Impressionist and modern sales." At Sotheby's sale of the Emily Fisher Landau collection in November 2023, all 31 lots in the evening sale were guaranteed, Apollo reports, and 13 sold "below or at the low estimate, very likely to the guarantors." Felix Salmon's verdict, quoted in the same article, is that heavily guaranteed auctions look "less like anonymised price-discovery mechanisms and more like gussied-up private sales." Christie's Newhouse collection sale in May 2026 sold 100% and was, The Art Newspaper reported, entirely backed by third-party guarantees.

What that means for you:

• Silence isn't failure. If the room is silent, the guarantor takes the work at the agreed price, so a guaranteed lot sells whatever the demand.
• A low result is weak evidence. A hammer at or near the low estimate may mean a guarantor won it; Apollo's Fisher Landau figures suggest as much.
• Passing is costly. Willem-Joost de Gier is quoted by Apollo as saying: "Works that pass at auction lose 32 per cent of their value on average when they finally resell."
• Someone ends up holding the work. The Wall Street Journal reported that by the end of 2008 Christie's and Sotheby's were holding an estimated $63 million in art they had been obliged to buy, Apollo notes.
• Look for the marker. Apollo's example is a Canaletto that sold at Christie's London for a record £31.9 million in June 2025 with a diamond symbol on its online listing, indicating a third-party guarantee. Ask a specialist what a lot you care about carries.

The market going in

The last two seasons set the bar these estimates are written against. Sotheby's New York sales in November 2025 reached $1.17 billion — by its own count the second highest in the company's history, after November 2021. They were the first held at its new headquarters, the Marcel Breuer building at 945 Madison Avenue, which housed the Whitney Museum until 2014 and then, in turn, the Met and the Frick. On 18 November 2025 Klimt's Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16), from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, sold for a total of $236.4 million after bidding opened at $130 million and two telephone bidders took it to the end. Sotheby's calls it the highest price of any work of modern art ever sold at auction; it more than doubled Klimt's previous record of $108.8 million. Two days later Frida Kahlo's El sueño (La cama) made $55 million against an estimate of $40–60 million, beating the previous $44 million record for a work by a woman artist and Kahlo's own $34.9 million. It was last bought through Sotheby's in 1980, for $51,000.

In May 2026 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, according to The Art Newspaper. The Newhouse collection made $540.5 million at hammer ($630.8 million with fees), and Pollock's Number 7A (1948) made $157 million at hammer ($181.8 million with fees), a record for the artist, after two telephone bidders started at $107 million. Phillips's evening sale on 19 May made $115.2 million with all 41 lots sold, up 122% on the previous year, the house says.

The two Christie's figures describe the same two nights. When you read a result, check whether it is hammer or with fees before you compare it with an estimate.

Estimate, reserve, hammer, bill

• Estimate: the range the house expects the hammer price to reach. It excludes fees.
• Reserve: the seller's confidential minimum. At the major houses it is set at or below the low estimate, and a lot that stalls below it is "bought in" and goes unsold.
• Hammer price: the final bid, before the premium.
• Buyer's premium: the house's fee on top of the hammer price, charged on a sliding scale.
• Guarantee: a minimum price promised to the seller by the house or a third party. Coverage of the Blaquier-Arrieta sale doesn't say whether any lot is guaranteed, so treat the estimates as forecasts and check the catalogue notes.

Bids are placed against the hammer price, so the ceiling you give an auctioneer, a telephone representative or an absentee form is the hammer figure, not your total. Decide your limit as a total, then work back to a hammer price using the Sotheby's New York tiers above (the house's terms of sale govern, and taxes come on top):

• $1 million all-in: a hammer ceiling of $781,250, because the whole bid sits in the 28% band.
• $5 million all-in: a hammer ceiling of $4 million — $0.56 million on the first $2 million, $0.44 million on the next $2 million.
• $10 million all-in: a hammer ceiling of about $8.1 million — an $8 million hammer already costs $9.88 million with the premium.

For the wider mechanics of bidding, see The Collector's Guide to Art Fairs and Auctions: Navigating High-Stakes Environments. When results come in, line them up against the table above: the right-hand column if the figure includes fees, the middle one if it doesn't.