After Monday’s two-part blockbuster at Christie’s kicked off the November marquee sales week with a dozen or more bidding wars, the auction house’s 21st-century sale on Wednesday evening was far tamer, and quite a bit smaller.
The sale’s hammer total came to $99.7 million on 44 lots, right smack in the middle of the cumulative pre-sale estimate of $87.5 million to $127 million. With fees, the night’s take came to $123.6 million. There were no withdrawals and only one work—Cecily Brown’s 2022 painting It’s not yesterday anymore—failed to sell.
The night kicked off with 18 lots from the collection of Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, two beloved Chicago philanthropists who made numerous appearances on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list. Edlis, who died in 2019, was known as a major supporter of conceptual art and, with Neeson, collected many top postwar, Pop, and contemporary artists. The works on offer Wednesday reflected that focus.
Of the Edlis-Neeson works, Cindy Sherman’s 1978 work Untitled Film Still #13 (Lot 2); Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Painting (Diptych), from 1978, (Lot 5); Tom Wesselmann’s 1962 painting Great American Nude #41 (Lot 10); and several Diego Giacometti sculptures generated the most heat.
The Sherman work got the first applause of the night after hammering for $1.8 million, more than double the high estimate of $700,000. With fees, the sale price came to $2.3 million. The fiercest bidding war, however, was for the Giacomettis, as no less than six Christie’s specialists battled on the phones for each of two identical lots, Bibliothèque au Mexique (ca. 1966). Katharine Arnold, vice chairman and head of postwar and contemporary art in Europe, won both works (at just below $2.1 million a piece), though—judging by the paddle numbers—for two different clients. (All prices are inclusive of fees unless otherwise indicated.)
The final Edlis-Neeson work, another Giacometti described by auctioneer Adrien Meyer as the couple’s “coffee table” sparked the longest—and deepest—bidding of the evening, with nearly 40 bids cast over seven-minutes between several Christie’s specialists and a bidder in the room. Alex Rotter, Christie’s global president came away the victor on that, landing the work for a client at $4.53 million.
The last lot from the Edlis-Neeson portion of the sale, Diego Giacometti’s ‘Berceau’ Low Table, Modèle aux Renards (ca. 1974) sold for $4.53 million.
Courtesy Christie's
There were also three records set on the evening, all of which came after the Edlis-Neeson portion of the evening was complete. Just hours after Firelei Baez’s record was set at Phillips, it was reset at Christie’s, when the 2021 painting Untitled (Colonization in America, Visual History Wall Map, Prepared by Civic Education Service) sold for $1.1 million, against a $150,000 to $200,000 estimate. Exactly 15 lots later, Olga de Amaral’s record was reset when the 2011 gold leaf work Pueblo H sold for $3.1 million, on a $400,000 to $600,000 estimate. And, as the sale wrapped up, Bay Area figurative painter Joan Brown’s record was reset at $596,500 for After the Alcatraz Swim #2 (1975), against a $200,000 to $300,000 estimate.
One other notable result: Kerry James Marshall’s 2007 painting Portrait of John Punch (Angry Black Man 1646) sold for $7.15 million on a $6 million high estimate. On Tuesday night at Sotheby’s, a 2008 untitled painting by Marshall, from the collection of Neda Young, estimated at $10–15 million, was one of only two works to fail to sell.
Firelei Báez’s 2021 Untitled (Colonization in America, Visual History Wall Map, Prepared by Civic Education Service) sold for $1.1 million, setting a new auction record for the artist.
Courtesy Christie's
Despite the records, and the more active bidding present this week, there were more than a handful of misses, though no disasters. Works by George Condo, Richard Prince, John Currin, Jeff Koons, Luc Tuymans, and Ron Mueck—from the Edlis-Neeson Collection—as well as those by Marlene Dumas, Hodges, Koons (again), Christopher Wool, Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari, and Prince (again) all hammered below their low estimates. Some were close, and with fees added, were in range. And Wool’s 1990 text-based painting Untitled (RIOT), it should be noted, took the top result of the evening with a $19.8 million sale price.
Most surprising perhaps was Cecily Brown’s It’s not yesterday anymore, which received three bids before auctioneer Yü-Ge Wang—who took over for Meyer after the Edlis-Neeson lots were complete—pulled the work.
As art adviser and appraiser David Shapiro reminded ARTnews after the sale, Brown’s record was reset on Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s after a 10-minute showdown brought High Society (1997–98) from a starting bid of $4 million to a total of $9.8 million. “Market buoyancy notwithstanding, this example suggests that discernment with respect to quality may be a lesson preserved, at least in the meantime, from the last two years,” Shapiro said of Wednesday evening’s pass on It’s not yesterday anymore.
For Rebekah Bowling, a senior art adviser with Citi Wealth, the solid results across the major auction houses this week came down to caution. “The houses were incredibly cautious this season—conservative estimates, everything guaranteed—and that approach clearly worked,” Bowling told ARTnews. “It created confidence, and when people feel confident, they’ll spend on the big, trophy works.”
Indeed, 75 percent of Wednesday’s lots had guarantees. As of last week, all 18 lots from the Edlis-Neeson collection had either house or third-party guarantees. By the start of Wednesday’s sale, eight had gotten third-party backing, including Warhol’s The Last Supper (1986) which ended up selling for $8.13 million on a $6 million to $8 million estimate.
Art adviser Wendy Cromwell agreed that both Christie’s and Sotheby’s helped bring buyers off the sidelines this season. “The houses helped by tightening the sales—better estimates, better material,” Cromwell told ARTnews after Christie’s Wednesday sale. “It felt curated instead of thrown together, and people responded.”
And, in a very of 2025 moment, the U-Haul Art Fair parked two trucks in front of Rockefeller Plaza, with one featuring a pachinko parlor with artist Ben Nuñez. And while not everyone could be a winner in the auction room, the U-Haul folks assured passersby that all they had to do was buy some balls to win a prize. As the sale neared its close, Julien Pradels, Christie’s president of the Americas, and Gillian Gorman Round, the house’s chief marketing officer, brought out tea and coffee on a trolley.
“They’re supporting art. Why not support them?” Gorman Round told ARTnews. “It’s bloody cold out there.
