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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

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).

After a 45% rise in prints and editions sale volume, Phillips goes from 4 live sales to 7 in 2022. All three major auction houses have a long-standing interest in the category but Phillips announced today that it will expand the number of its editions live auctions this year.

Sotheby’s has unveiled another Claude Monet work for the March 2nd sale in London. The late waterlilies work from 1914-1917 was purchased by Sotheby’s former owner Alfred Taubman in 1978 before he owned the auction house.

Painting sold to fund collector’s emigration to New York is offered with £35m estimate in March and hopes for much more. The market for works of German Expressionism is hampered by the limited supply of works in private hands and the relative paucity of trades that might excite both buyers and sellers.

Lucien Freud’s Girl with Closed Eyes, a portrait of Janey Longman painted by Freud in his sixties, will be offered during Christie’s March 1st relay sale connecting sale rooms in Shanghai and London. The work is being offered with its estimate upon request, a strategy that allows the house to gauge demand for the work in real time, but the whisper number places expectations above £10 million for the small canvas.

In their 2021 end of year reporting, Phillips auction house revealed that their sales of prints and multiples had risen by 46% from 2020 to 2021.

Phillips posted another strong sale of editioned works in London this week with 349 lots offered in day and evening sales for a total of £5,047,560. The $6.8 million total exceeds the pre-sale low estimate by 75%. That represents a dynamic score (or hammer ratio) of 1.87, a red-hot indicator.