2024’s top ten art auction results

Works by Magritte, Monet, Klimt and Warhol (among others) elicited the highest art auction bids of the year 2024. But what art market trends do these exceptional results illustrate?

2024’s art market saw few masterpieces on the podiums… a far cry from the splendor of 2022 when five different paintings from the Paul Allen Collection fetched prices beyond the $100 million threshold. However, the year was not without its surprises and it closed with a very strong result for a masterful painting by René Magritte that reflated the depressed premium segment, adding some much-needed fizz.

In this article we take a closer look at that sale and spotlight the other big names of the year, including one major surprise: for the first time in auction history, Ed Ruscha’s annual turnover total was higher than that of Impressionist master, Claude Monet.

Chapters

René Magritte: best result of 2024
Ed Ruscha: auction record gains 30%
Claude Monet: two paintings in the Top 10
Jean-Michel Basquiat: a landmark sale for Phillips
Gustav Klimt: a historical portrait sets Austrian record
Mark Rothko: Hong Kong’s best result hides a significant loss
Andy Warhol: a new record for Flowers
Van Gogh: a precious rarity

René Magritte: best result of 2024

For the first time ever, the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte was the top selling artist in the world, with an annual turnover total of $312 million. This total beat those of heavyweights like Picasso, Monet and Warhol, and it included a sensational new record for his L’empire des lumières, which fetched $121 million in November at Christie’s New York.

This emblematic painting, often exhibited and extensively documented, had never been put up for auction. But it wasn’t just its virgin status on the market that explained the result. It came at the end MAGRITTE of a year celebrating the centenary of Surrealism and on the back of a dizzying rise in Magritte’s prices – with a price index up +80% over the last decade.

The result was also the fruit of excellent strategic work by Christie’s, which secured an ambitious guarantee of $95 million before the sale, thus ensuring an exceptional price for this masterpiece even before the sale began.

Read: Surrealism’s Centenary excites collectors [11/26/2024]

Top 10 fine art auction results in 2024

Ed Ruscha: auction record gains 30%

The only living artist in the ranking, Ed Ruscha left his mark on the year with a powerful new auction record of $68 million at Christie’s for Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964). This work, described as a great synthesis and culmination of his masterpieces from the 1960s by Christie’s Vice-President, Max Carter, confirms Ruscha’s decisive importance on the American art market.

The painting belongs to one of the artist’s most iconic series, dedicated to the Standard Oil gas stations he passed during his road trips between Los Angeles and Oklahoma. With characteristic humor and modesty, RUSCHA declared: “I don’t have a Seine like Monet; I just have Route 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.”

But this result also had an intra-national geographical dimension as it marked a mini-revolution in the symbolic duel between America’s East Coast and West Coast: for the first time, an artist from Los Angeles fetched a better result than his illustrious New York counterparts. In 2024, Ruscha even had the luxury of surpassing Basquiat and Warhol. A resounding victory for West Coast art!

Ed Ruscha’s annual auction turnovers

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Claude Monet: two paintings in the Top 10

A regular member of our annual Top 10 auction rankings (both annual and single results), Claude Monet once again established himself as an absolute reference with two major works among the best results of 2024: one of his Water Lilies paintings fetched $65.5 million and his Haystacks in Giverny (Meules à Giverny) sold for $34.8 million.

These results highlight the absolute solidity of demand for works by the Impressionist master. Meules à Giverny generated the third best auction result ever recorded for a painting from this iconic series, while the Water Lilies painting fetched the fifth best price among the 145 works in the Water Lilies series sold at auction over the past three decades.

Claude Monet’s all-time record however, remains unrivaled: $110.7 million for an exceptional painting sold in 2019, where the masterful fusion of colors and light captivated collectors at Sotheby’s.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: a landmark sale for Phillips

A major work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (ELMAR), gave the auction house Phillips one of the five best fine art auction results of the year (fourth best).

Untitled (ELMAR) embodies the essence of BASQUIAT’s most iconic works, with multiple advantages: a prestigious provenance and an impressive exhibition history. ELMAR was presented during the commemorative exhibition of the 10th anniversary of the artist’s death, at the Gagosian in Los Angeles in 1998, then highlighted at the 2018 retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.

Compared with Phillips’ estimate of between $40 and $60 million, its final price of $46.4 million might appear below expectations. However, it should be noted that Basquiat has only crossed the $60 million threshold four times, and it was always during particularly dynamic periods in the art market, which was not the case last year.

Despite a more moderate market, Basquiat continued to assert his domination: for the fourteenth consecutive year, he remained the undisputed leader of the Contemporary art market, alone generating 13% of the segment’s global turnover in 2023-2024.

Read: The Pillars of the Contemporary Art Market, (Contemporary Art Market Report 2024)

Gustav Klimt: a historical portrait sets Austrian record

During the sale hosted by im Kinsky in Vienna on 24 April 2024, Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Miss Lieser (1917) fetched $41.1 million. Although the high estimate for the work was $53 million and recent Klimt auctions have exceeded this amount, this result was all the more remarkable as it was hammered in Klimt’s home country. Until then, his most emblematic works were mainly sold through New York or London. The work was acquired by a private collection in Hong Kong.

The result set a historic record for the Austrian art market. A year earlier, in June 2023, Sotheby’s set a stunning new record for the artist by selling another emblematic Klimt portrait Lady with a Fan for $108.7 million. This same Lady with a fan had already been sold at auction in 1994 for $10 million. Its resale in 2023 marked one of the biggest value accretions in art market history.

Andy Warhol: a new record for Flowers

Three paintings from Warhol’s Flowers series made the biggest contribution to his annual turnover total. But it was one of them, dating from 1964, that caused a sensation. Depicting three orange flowers and one bright red one, this work was first exhibited in New York by Leo Castelli the same year, before changing hands several times without ever going to auction.

This painting far exceeded its initial estimate of $5 million and set, at $35.5 million, a new historic record for his Flowers series. The previous record (in 2022) barely came close to half this amount, at 15.8 million. WARHOL’s Flowers series has been arousing growing interest, gradually asserting itself as a valuable alternative to his iconic series of portraits (Marilyn, Mao and Basquiat).

Mark Rothko: Hong Kong’s best result hides a significant loss

On 11 November 2024, Sotheby’s hammered its best Hong Kong result of the year for Mark ROTHKO’s Untitled (Yellow and Blue), a masterful work dating from 1954 that fetched $32.4 million. The painting, of dazzling luminous intensity, had notably appeared in the prestigious François Pinault Collection before being offered at auction in New York in 2015, where it reached $46.45 million, i.e. $14 million more!

This $14 million shortfall perfectly illustrates the current fatigue in the high-end art market in 2024, where new records have proven much more difficult to hammer, especially in Hong Kong, which was getting accustomed to even more spectacular results than New York in recent years.

Evolution of Rothko’s position in the global rankings

Van Gogh, a precious rarity

In 2024, only four paintings by Van Gogh came up for auction, but one of them stood out with an exceptional result. The Garden Corner with Butterflies was very well received and it fetched over $33 million.

Inspired by the Parisian avant-garde, in this 1887 painting, Van Gogh effectuated a stylistic revolution adopting a brighter palette and techniques influenced by Impressionism and Pointillism. He gradually abandoned the dark tones that marked his initial works, using a lighter and more refined touch, where nature and the landscape become the real protagonists.

This painting has a remarkable provenance. It was transmitted within the painter’s family, passing from his brother, Theo, to Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, then to Vincent Willem van Gogh. The work then joined leading collections, including those of Joseph and Lily Reinach in Paris. After a stint at Wildenstein & Co. in New York in 1987, it was acquired in 1998 by an anonymous owner before joining the auction at Christie’s in May 2024. Although the work had never been auctioned before, it has appeared in around ten major exhibitions dedicated to Van Gogh around the world.

The provenance of this work – of which there are even traces in epistolary exchanges between Vincent and his brother Theo – and the new brilliance of its bucolic “Impressionism” were its best assets.

This Top 10 highlights some notable trends in the art market: records for never-before-auctioned works with impeccable provenance, but also lackluster results, such as the disappointing one for the Rothko in Hong Kong. However, the auction world has not yet revealed all its secrets. While waiting to uncover all the key insights in the upcoming Artmarket by Artprice Global Art Market Report, stay tuned!

Major Artists and Record Sales – Art Market Dynamics – Auction Houses and Strategies