Turner, Magritte, Hockney, Basquiat, and Wong Anchored a Year of New York Auction Standouts
A single painting can reorder an artist’s market narrative, and last year’s auction season offered several such moments. From a J.M.W. Turner landscape that unexpectedly appeared in a 20th-century evening sale to a Jean-Michel Basquiat canvas that dominated the Contemporary category, a cluster of November results in New York helped define the year’s top performers across multiple segments.
British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) returned to the upper ranks after being absent from the prior year’s list, landing in fourth place. The catalyst was “Ehrenbreitstein, or The Bright Stone of Honour and the Tomb of Marceau, from Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’,” which sold for $11.9 million at Christie’s in New York in November. Notably, the work crossed the block in an evening sale of 20th-century art, a context that underscored how category boundaries can blur when a picture’s visual force and rarity take over the room.
In the Impressionist and Modern field, Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898–1967) posted a tightly priced but telling result. His “Le Jockey perdu” (1942) achieved $12.3 million at Sotheby’s in New York in November, edging just above its $12 million top estimate. The painting’s provenance added a layer of institutional-grade credibility: it was once owned by the artist and collector William N. Copley and had most recently been held by collectors Matthew and Carolyn Bucksbaum.
British artist David Hockney (b. 1937) maintained his position in third place, supported by a major figure painting with a long market memory. “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy” (1968) realized $44.3 million at Christie’s in New York in November. The price carried an additional charge because the same work had failed to sell decades earlier — in 1985, it did not meet a $600,000 reserve at Sotheby’s in New York — a reminder of how taste, scholarship, and collector appetite can transform an artwork’s perceived stakes over time.
The Contemporary category belonged to American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), whose total sales figure outpaced second-place Yoshitomo Nara by more than fourfold. Basquiat’s “Crowns (Peso Neto)” (1981) was the top lot of the year in the category, selling for $48.3 million at Sotheby’s New York in November. The result reinforced Basquiat’s continued ability to concentrate demand at the very top end of the market, where a single iconic work can set the tone for an entire season.
Ultra-Contemporary, meanwhile, offered a more compressed but no less revealing snapshot. Canadian artist Matthew Wong (1984–2019) secured a place on the top-10 list with just six lots. Among them, “The Gentle Sea” (2017) stood out: estimated at $1.2 million–$1.8 million, it finished at $2.37 million at Sotheby’s New York. The painting had been sold twice by Karma gallery, a detail that points to the increasingly visible interplay between primary-market stewardship and secondary-market acceleration.
Taken together, these results illustrate how the market’s most legible signals often arrive through a small number of high-profile transactions. In a year shaped by selective bidding and heightened scrutiny of quality, the works that broke through did so not by volume, but by conviction — and by the particular alchemy of timing, provenance, and the room’s appetite for a picture that feels inevitable once it appears.
