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A market that favors emerging talent plays to Phillips strength. Phillips Evening sale in London made £30.1 million or $39.5 million with 39 of the 41 lots offered sold. Another six lots were withdrawn pre-sale.

The total for Sotheby’s London Evening sales was $296,145,253 with 65 of the 76 lots offered finding buyers. That 85% sell-through rate would have been a very strong sale in the age before auctions were so heavily managed.

With the addition of a Surrealism sale, the auction house achieved solid results in a market that is equalizing between buyers and sellers. Yesterday at Christie’s, the total sale was more than $334 million with an average lot value of $3.24 million. The sell-through rate was a very well-managed 93% with 36% of the lots selling above the estimate range.

Just before her death last year at 96, her work reached a new high of $494,010. Two sales this week will tell the market more.

Estimated at $70 million, the key work has the potential to re-set the market. In a little more than a month, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s family is going to open an exhibition of his work and the family’s holdings in lower Manhattan.

This week in London nearly $70 million of Claude Monet’s art will be offered at Sotheby’s and Phillips with the overwhelming majority of the works appearing at the former house. It’s hardly uncommon for the influential Impressionist artist whose work prefigures Modern abstraction to be a mainstay of the auctions.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s A Sunflower from Maggie (1937) will be a highlight of Christie’s 20th Century Art Evening sale this May in New York. The painting comes from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA); it is being deaccessioned to benefit the museum’s future acquisitions.

Following last November’s blow-out sale of works by Vincent van Gogh, $160 million in only four works by the artist were sold in the New York sales, Christie’s has announced a major landscape for the May sales.

The three-part work from the 1982 Fun Gallery show is priced at more than $30 million

Galleries hauled their art to Los Angeles and were rewarded with these sales …

Benjamin Godsill of Curatorial Services, LLC and the Nota Bene podcast discusses his ideal client and collecting art to gain a better understanding of the world.

One of the painter's last monumental triptychs comes to the block from a Swiss collection. Christie’s announced overnight that it would be selling Francis Bacon’s Triptych 1986-87 estimated at £35,000,000 ($47.3 million).