With the US presidential election behind us and the marquee New York evening sales just a few days away, collectors, advisors, and all manner of art world professionals have been combing through the full list of auction house offerings, ARTnews included. 

This November, works by art historical heavyweights David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Ellsworth Kelly, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jean Michel Basquiat (of course) take the stage behind auctioneers who hope to coax out as many bids as possible from buyers in the room, on the phones, and watching online from across the globe. 

ARTnews has already revealed a number of the consignors behind this season’s biggest lots, including Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), courtesy of the Peter Brant’s Brant Foundation, and Yayoi Kusama’s 2018 picture Infinity-Nets (RDUEL), which has ties to disgraced art dealer and forthcoming biopic subject Inigo Philbrick.

But there is always more to learn. Further investigating has revealed more names of collectors that we believe to be unloading while interest rates are (relatively) good. And while high-net-worth individuals have cut back their spending over the last 12 months, we are in a “collector’s market,” according to many market-watchers. If the work is good enough, the bidders are sure to raise their paddles. 

The first lot at Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary evening sale, Yu Nishimura’s 2020 work Pause, seems to come from the esteemed collection of Dallas collectors Howard and Cindy Rachofsky. The work was featured as part of the Allan Schwartzman-curated show “Open Storage: 25 Years Of Collecting” which ran from August 26, 2022 – April 29, 2023, at the Rachofskys’ contemporary art space in Dallas, The Warehouse. The Rachofsky’s did not return a request for comment, while a Sotheby’s spokesperson told ARTnews that “as a policy, we don’t comment on consignors’ identity since that’s confidential.”

A new art market report by Bank of America suggests buying conditions are improving for collectors thanks to lower auction estimates, discounts at galleries, and interest rate cuts, among other factors.

Titled “Art Market Update Fall 2024: Opportunity Knocks?,” it says next week’s New York fall auctions and Art Basel Miami in early December can expect higher collector participation as a result.

“Bidder competition at auction has slowed, meaning buyers may be able to purchase works more affordably than in recent years,” the report says. “The anticipated favorable buying conditions come on the heels of lower-than-expected art sales in the secondary market during the first half of the year – with auction prices coming in only 1 percent above their aggregated mid-estimates, the smallest increase in seven-plus years.”

One category that has declined in recent years, and therefore presents opportunities for buyers, is the emerging artist market. Sotheby’s The Now sale of “wet paint” works, which regularly saw record-breaking bidding wars in 2022, has witnessed a 55 percent fall in sales totals since.

The report points to Colombian artist María Berrío’s La Cena (2012, mixed media collage on canvas) as an example. It sold for $1.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2022 before Christie’s offered the work again in 2024 for an estimate of $350,000 to $450,000. It sold for $441,000, marking a 71 percent decline in just two years.

However, on the flip side, the Latin American artist market is on the rise “as international collectors increasingly seek diverse and historically significant work,” the report says. Sotheby’s reported that sales of works by LatAm artists (both historical and contemporary) have risen by more than 50 percent above pre-pandemic years, topping $250 million between 2020 and 2023.

Dealers face a ‘critical choice’

“Art Market Update Fall 2024: Opportunity Knocks?” says the current market correction, which started last year in the wake of high inflation and interest rates – and global geopolitical unrest – “has spilled into 2024.”

“Less marquee estate property in the May sales potentially also dampened bidders’ confidence and enthusiasm. Fewer masterpiece works are being offered in what has widely been viewed as a ‘buyer’s market,’” it reads.

As Drew Watson, Bank of America’s head of art services, told ARTnews, these conditions give collectors the upper hand when negotiating with dealers.

“Heading into 2025, we see two themes emerging across the art market,” he said. “First, there is good news for buyers. The 2023 market correction carried over into this year, creating a favorable buying environment for collectors. As the primary market adjusts, galleries are tasked with navigating pricing inventory. Collectors now have more room to negotiate and secure favorable transaction terms.”

The report says that galleries “face a critical choice: adapt to the new market reality or risk accumulating unsold inventory.” “Collectors are more discerning than ever,” Watson continued. “They know that galleries continue to sell A+ works, but that terms are more negotiable on everything else. Collectors are using that knowledge to secure more favorable transaction terms: including skipping waitlists, eliminating resale restrictions and ‘buy one gift one,’ and of course, price discounts.”

Younger collectors and art as a wealth strategy

The second theme, Watson explained, is collectors increasingly incorporating their art holdings into their overall wealth strategy. “We expect interest to grow among younger generations too,” he said. “In fact, Bank of America Private Bank published a study this year showing 56 percent of collectors now consider their art as a part of their wealth management strategy, including 98 percent of younger collectors (millennials and Gen Z).”

“Art Market Update Fall 2024: Opportunity Knocks?” says the estimated value of art and collectibles is predicted to top $2.8 trillion by 2026 and comprise more than 10 percent of ultra-high-net-worth individuals’ portfolios.

How will Trump’s win impact the art market?

As the report explains, in the past two presidential election years, the fall marquee sales “contracted sharply,” so concern about next week’s auction “is understandable” given Donald Trump’s recent victory.

“Today’s market is already vulnerable, with auction totals in the first half of 2024 coming in at their lowest number since the pandemic shock of 2020,” the report explains. “Uncertainty on the direction of fiscal and monetary policies that may affect art transactions and collectors’ ability to move and pay for art could complicate things further. And while auction houses seem confident on the number of consignments coming to market this fall, some argue that the outcome of the election — including the potential for an indeterminate or disputed result — may distract or cause hesitancy on the side of the buyer. It may also bear on the willingness of savvy buyers and sellers to transact until the policies of a new administration are clear.”

Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Surrealism. These are among the many -isms of early 20th-century European modernism, an artistic lineage that’s chock full of movements appended with that suffix. But Orphism? That’s not likely one discussed much today outside academia, and perhaps for a good reason: it barely existed.

This, at least, is something one could draw from the Guggenheim Museum’s sprawling Orphism survey, a wonderfully nerdy exhibition about one of the more unfashionable modernist styles. It’s tempting to say the show, titled “Harmony and Dissonance,” makes the case for why Orphism matters, but it doesn’t—not that that’s a count against its curatorial thesis. Instead, this Guggenheim blockbuster, which surveys work made between 1910 and the early ’40s, proves that Orphism was less a movement than a pivotal transitional moment in Western art history.

What, exactly, was Orphism, then? Well, the answer to that is sort of complicated. For the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, its inventor, Orphism was an artistic tendency that sought to offer “a more internal, less intellectual, more poetic vision of the universe and of life,” as he wrote in 1913. That’s a pretty squishy definition, but Apollinaire knew Orphism when he saw it. And he saw it specifically in the work of Paris-based artists such as Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia, both of whom were, at the time, painting highly stylized images composed of fractured forms that appeared to dance around their canvases. Apollinaire claimed that these works translated sounds into images and in that way embodied the spirit of Orpheus, the Greek mythological hero known as a preternaturally talented musician.

Both Delaunay and Picabia appear early in the Guggenheim show, grouped together in a gallery that suggests the many forms Orphism took. Delaunay is represented by a circular painting in which the moon shatters into an amalgam of variously colored disks; Picabia by the wonderfully weird Edtaonisl (Ecclésiastique), from 1913, which looks like an explosion of machine innards. The harsh, industrial look of Picabia’s painting shares very little in common with the opulence of Delaunay’s highly saturated colors, yet Apollinaire brought the two together and called it a movement.

He also lumped in František Kupka, whose Localization of Graphic Motifs II (1912–13) is here at the Guggenheim alongside Edtaonisl. The Kupka painting likewise borders on total abstraction, with an angel-like figure at its center whose wings emit pulsing black, purple, and green forms. Those forms ripple across the canvas, as though they were visualizing an echo.

“If you have all my multiples,” Joseph Beuys once said, “then you have me completely.” The polymathic German sculptor was referring to the editioned objects that bore the intellectual and emotional freight of his artistic project. Ranging from blackboard erasers to carved blocks of copper-infused beeswax, these objects were small in scale and large in edition size. Because of that, Beuys believed they could disseminate his radical notions of art as a transformational social force far and wide—even when he wasn’t present to facilitate that process. 

Of the nearly 600 multiples he produced, some 400 are included in the Broad’s forthcoming exhibition, “Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature,” opening November 16. Assembled in this show are found objects, sculptures, paintings, oil sketches, photographs, posters, films, and materials related to his political actions, like fliers and office supplies—a massive grouping of artworks that amount to “the whole Beuys,” as the artist himself once called his multiples.

“For him, all manner of things mattered,” said Beuys scholar Andrea Gyorody, who organized the show along with Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibition manager of the Broad. “He put great effort into enshrining simple base materials with value, preserving their longevity as art objects.”

Despite the diversity of material forms, the multiples share a conceptual concern for restoring individual wellness and transforming the conditions of social reality. Beuys once said art was “the only genuinely human medium for revolutionary change … completing the transformation from a sick world to a healthy one.” These ideas were borne out in his editions, as well as his large-scale sculptures, performances, and political actions.

Capri-Batterie (1985), one of his best-known editions, features a yellow light bulb plugged into a socket stuck in a freshly picked lemon. The work requires continuous replenishment—the lemon gradually rots, which means the fruit needs to be replaced regularly. Replacing the lemon elicits a form of social participation, something Beuys actively encouraged, and suggests a kind of regeneration that the artist embraced. Moreover, the piece marries the artificial and the organic, implying a reconciliation between humanity and nature.

The British Museum has been gifted one of the world’s most prodigious collections of Chinese ceramics, worth £1 billion ($1.27 billion), in what is likely the highest-value donation of art ever received by a UK museum.

The 1,700-piece collection—including a wine cup painted with chickens from the Ming Dynasty—was donated by the trustees of the Sir Percival David Foundation and has been on long-term loan to the London museum in a dedicated gallery since 2009. Such a high-value donation of art is uncommon in the UK; the last headline-making gift received by the British Museum was a bequest from a late trustee worth £123 million, or $156 million.

Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, called the Percival ceramics an “incomparable private collection.”

He added: “These celebrated objects add a special dimension to our own collection and together offer scholars, researchers and visitors around the world the incredible opportunity to study and enjoy the very best examples of Chinese craftsmanship anywhere in existence.”

Percival David was born in 1892 in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) into a wealthy Jewish family with ties to Iran. He was a baron by way of inheritance, as well as the owner of his family’s lucrative textile and banking business. In 1914, at age 22, he moved to London and after a first purchase of three Chinese ceramics became a passionate collector of Chinese art and literature.

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