Warhol’s “Brigitte Bardot” Sells for $16.7 Million in a Secret New York Auction During Christie’s Evening Sale
On November 19, while Christie’s Rockefeller Center salesroom was deep into its evening auction of 20th-century art, a second sale was quietly taking shape a few blocks away — one that many bidders in the room never saw coming.
A small contingent of market insiders, led by art advisor Jussi Pylkkänen, left Christie’s mid-sale and headed to Clemente Bar, the private, art-world haunt above chef Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park. There, Fair Warning, the online art-sales platform founded by Loic Gouzer, staged an invitation-only auction with a single work on offer: American artist Andy Warhol (1928–1987) and his 1974 portrait “Brigitte Bardot.”
Estimated at $8 million to $12 million, the painting sold for $16.7 million. Pylkkänen — Christie’s former chief auctioneer — presided over the bidding, gavel in hand. The result made “Brigitte Bardot” the most expensive Warhol to sell during the season.
The private sale generated intense chatter among dealers and advisors during a week otherwise dominated by headline-grabbing public auctions, including Sotheby’s sales of works from Leonard Lauder’s collection. According to reporting by Artnet, Fair Warning’s hand-picked guest list included Greek shipping magnate George Economou; collector David Mugrabi, whose family is known for holding the largest Warhol collection in private hands; and artist-dealer Tony Shafrazi.
Gouzer has framed the format as a deliberate blend of two systems. “Some people want to have the benefit of the auction and the private sale,” he said. “It’s a hybrid.” In practice, that hybrid offers the competitive clarity of an auction result while preserving the discretion, selectivity, and choreography of a private transaction.
The Warhol sale also lands amid a broader recalibration at the top of the market. After a slowdown that began in 2022, fine-art auction sales rose 13.3 percent in 2025 to $11.7 billion, according to the Artnet Price Database — an improvement on 2024’s second-lowest total in a decade, though still below the $16.6 billion peak recorded in 2021. Works selling for $10 million or more contributed to the rebound: proceeds in that bracket climbed 36.1 percent year over year to $2.3 billion, the largest increase among the price tiers tracked.
Even with those gains, the market’s center of gravity has narrowed. As Philip Hoffman, CEO of the Fine Art Group, put it, buyers are increasingly reserving their biggest checks for the rarest, most definitive examples — the kind of “unique” works that can still draw multiple bidders at $40 million and beyond.
That dynamic helps explain why off-calendar, off-grid auctions are attracting attention. They cater to a small pool of ultra-wealthy collectors — the “whales” auction houses and advisors debate in surprisingly modest numbers — while giving sellers a way to test demand for a trophy work without the full glare of a marquee evening sale.
For now, Fair Warning’s $16.7 million Warhol stands as a vivid snapshot of where the market’s energy is concentrating: on masterpieces, on discretion, and on new formats that borrow the theater of the saleroom while keeping the doors firmly closed.
