Day sales are usually where the market’s real temperature is taken—where trends sharpen and the middle market either holds or crumbles. On Thursday, Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art day sale brought in a healthy $88.7 million, with sell-through rates of 88 percent by lot and 90 percent by value. These day sales may not be as sexy as their moonlit evening counterparts, but they often deliver the clearest signals—if you’re paying attention.
The loudest signal this time came from a canvas that looked nothing like the week’s blockbuster lots: Keller Fair II, a 1960 painting by Lynne Drexler that sold for $2,027,000, shattering her previous auction record by nearly $500,000 and far exceeding its $800,000–$1.2 million estimate. For a second-generation Abstract Expressionist who spent much of her career in obscurity, the result suggests a market moving into a new phase.
Among those tracking Drexler closely, the price wasn’t a shock. Sources told ARTnews that private sales have already hit higher numbers. What made Keller Fair II stand out was its quality. Advisors, dealers, and auction specialists agreed: this was a rare, exceptional example from Drexler’s early 1960s output, the dense, pulsating period that Mnuchin Gallery and Berry Campbell foregrounded in their widely-watched 2022 joint exhibition.
“It looks different when you’re building a market, which is a slow and steady process,” Christine Berry, co-founder of Berry Campbell, told ARTnews. Her gallery specializes in underrecognized postwar artists like Drexler. At first, Berry said, interest in Drexler came mainly from “deep in the industry”—dealers and advisors steeped in postwar abstraction. “But now it’s becoming clear to the mainstream collector that people should be paying attention,” she said. The market appears to have matured.
There’s hard data behind that. Before 2020, Drexler had never crossed the $10,000 mark at auction. By 2022, her work was landing in seven-figure evening sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, often blowing past estimates. That momentum owes much to the 2022 Mnuchin/Berry Campbell show “The First Decade,” a wide-ranging survey of her 1959-1969 abstractions that reframed Drexler not as a rediscovered footnote but as a modernist force. Another key moment came earlier that year with “Shatter,” an exhibition at Art Intelligence Global’s Hong Kong space, organized by Saara Pritchard. That show introduced major early works to a new collector base hungry for postwar women painters. “Shatter” was also Drexler’s first major show outside Maine.
But since then, sourcing top-tier Drexlers has been difficult. According to Pritchard—a collector, advisor, and former specialist at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s—there are only 30 to 40 canvases at Keller Fair II’s scale or larger, and more than a quarter are already in museums. Many others have condition issues, like surface cracking, and water damage that’s especially visible in her densely worked 1959–62 canvases.
“This is really one of her best paintings,” Pritchard told ARTnews. She called it a “unicorn”—a work with bright, layered color, a balanced composition, and unusually strong condition. In contrast, many recent Drexler lots have had surface cracking or duller palettes. “What’s come to auction recently has not been fabulous paintings,” she said. This canvas, she added, “is as good as it gets.”
Berry echoed that. The demand she sees now—in private sales, inquiries, and cross-period interest—extends far beyond the handful of “industry high-powered players” who sparked Drexler’s first surge. “We were selling things at $45,000, then suddenly it was $100,000, and then $300,000,” she recalls. “And that was four years ago. What’s happening now is the result of steady, consistent growth in between.”
In that sense, Thursday’s result looks less like a spike and more like a public confirmation of what’s been happening quietly in private sales.
It’s worth noting that the consignor of Keller Fair II likely took a loss. One well-placed source told me that the same painting sold privately four years ago for roughly the same price. That context complicates the apparent upward momentum. The Drexler market, like every market, still has pockets of volatility. But, as we saw across the auctions this week, collectors are willing to pay top-tier prices for top-tier material. In the case of Drexler, the ceiling for those works hasn’t yet solidified.
The question now is supply, not demand. Works of the same caliber as Keller Fair II are scarce, and the pipeline from Drexler’s estate is limited. The 2022 Mnuchin/Berry Campbell exhibition revealed what the top of the market could look like but it did not open a floodgate. As more museums continue to acquire and exhibit her work—and with a traveling retrospective beginning in 2026 at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia —the number of major paintings circulating privately is likely to shrink further.
For now, a new benchmark is set. The market has sent its signal. And the crowd that once needed to be persuaded to look twice at Drexler now seems ready to compete for her best.
