THE SPRING AUCTIONS

The Spring Auctions are the fortnight in May when Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips hold their great sales of modern and contemporary art in New York, in the evening, one house after another.

In May 2026 the three houses’ evening sales made some two billion dollars in a week.

The Gala Sale

The evening sale was invented in London. On 15 October 1958 Sotheby’s sold seven Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pictures from the collection of Jakob Goldschmidt, a German banker, at night, to a room in black tie.

Somerset Maugham came, and Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn and Margot Fonteyn. The seven sold in twenty-one minutes for £781,000, and a Cézanne of a boy in a red waistcoat made £220,000, more than twice the auction record for a painting.

The auctioneer was Peter Wilson, Sotheby’s chairman. In 1964 he bought Parke-Bernet in New York; Christie’s followed in 1977, and New York has held the biggest sales ever since.

The Room

An evening sale is a few dozen lots, sold in an order worked out over weeks. The auctioneer stands at the rostrum, and along the side of the room specialists on telephones bid for clients who are not there. Much of the money is on the telephones.

The bid is shown on a board in several currencies as it climbs, and the price announced at the fall of the hammer is not what the buyer pays. The house’s premium is added on top.

In May 2022 Christie’s sold Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn for $195 million, then the highest price for any twentieth-century painting at auction. The hammer fell at $170 million; the rest was the premium.

In May 2026 Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A made $181.2 million at Christie’s, nearly three times his previous record.

When a great lot falls, the room applauds, and it is applauding a number.

What to Know

Christie’s is at Rockefeller Center, Sotheby’s in the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, and Phillips on Park Avenue.

Seats at the evening sales are by ticket, and the houses give them to their clients. The evening sales are streamed. The day sales that follow are open to anyone, and most of the lots are sold there.

A lounge suit. The black tie of 1958 is long gone.

Frieze and TEFAF fill the same fortnight.

The mistake is to take the hammer price for the price. The premium is added to every lot, and the published results include it.

The Court

The Spring Auctions are not the Court’s own. Seats at the evening sales, and time with the specialists beforehand, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. The Court bids for no one; a member who means to buy registers with the house.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.