Christie’s announced on Tuesday that its projected sales total for the first half of 2025 (H1-2025). The $2.1 billion figure, including fees, equals the sum it generated during the first half of 2024 (H1-2024).
While last year’s total marked a 22 percent year-on-year decline compared to same period for 2023, Alex Rotter, Christie’s global president, told journalists during a Zoom call that this year’s plateau was partly down to “renewed interest” in “pockets of 20th and 21st century art.”
Does this mean the market for modern and contemporary art is stabilizing after a drawn-out decline? Not necessarily. Strong sales in its luxury categories counter the even-keeled totals in most of the art categories. Christie’s sold almost 30 percent more handbags, watches, cars, and jewelry during H1-2025 than H1-2024, generating $468 million, or 22 percent of the $2.1 billion total.
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Rotter, however, was quick to emphasize the areas of the art market that have “done well,” adding, “The narrative that the market is down is overly simplistic,” he said. “We’re seeing Impressionist and modern works enjoying strong growth compared to 10 or 15 years ago.” Old Masters, for example, recorded a 15 percent increase in sales to $55 million, largely thanks to Christie’s a February sale in New York, which took in $24.4 million. While the result was still shy of its pre-sale high estimate of $33.2 million, it trumped the $13.7 million the house generated at an Old Masters sale in January 2024.
Rotter also pointed to what he called a positive “psychological shift” from collectors sparked by Christie’s “creating excitement in the market.” He continued, “We’re not reinventing art, but we’re revisiting categories and artists. Last year, you saw a return to Surrealism, and a focus on female Surrealist artists.”
Last fall’s blockbuster Surrealism survey at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, timed to celebrate the movement’s centenary, helped fuel collector interest. This past March, Christie’s London turned over £130.3 million ($174.4 million), including fees, during a three-hour, 72-lot double-header auction of 20th- and 21st-century art heavy on Surrealism. The standout lot was René Magritte’s La reconnaissance infinite (1933), which soared past its £6 million ($8 million) estimate to sell for £10.3 million ($13.7 million).
During Tuesday’s press conference, Christie’s provided a number of incisive statistics into the house’s $2.1 billion figure. Guaranteed lots, for example, accounted for only 1.5 percent of all lots sold in H1-2025, up from 1.3 percent in H1-2024. The index of hammer price to low estimate was 115 percent, meaning that the winning bids for all lots sold (before fees) outdid their minimum expectations by around 15 percent. Across both online and live auctions in all categories, the house notched a sell-through rate of 88 percent (on par with its figures for this period in 2023 and 2024).
More broadly, Christie’s sold seven of the top 10 works sold at any auction house in H1-2025, inlcuding the year’s highest-priced work so far: Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Grey, Yellow, Black, and Blue (1922). It sold for $46.7 million in New York as part of the Leonard and Louise Riggio sale, which totaled $272 million.
But the real excitement seems to be coming from the house’s bolstering luxury sales. Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s international head of jewelry, said its handbags, watches, and jewels categories have “recruited 41 percent of Christie’s new buyers, many of whom are now transacting in many other categories.” (Encouraging buying across categories is a strategy that both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have been pushing for a while.)
Last month, Christie’s New York sold the 10.38-carat “Marie-Thérèse Pink Diamond,” which may have been once owned by Marie Antoinette, for $14 million, nearly double its high estimate. Similarly, Christie’s acquisition of the car company Goodings last fall seems to have paid off, with car sales up 12 percent against last year.
Taking a birds-eye view of the market, Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brenan said that the “continuing narrative [of] major single owner collections—not only as estate property, but also discretionary sellers—is a great sign of confidence that the market is stable and secure.” AI, she said, will also play a role in how Christie’s plans to operate moving forward “to create greater efficiencies in our business, to help us in terms of client prospecting, targeting, enhancing that experience.”
So, what is going to kick-start the art market in the second half of the year? “We are at heart an auction business,” Brenan said. “We are a business where enthusiasm comes from that energy and excitement in the room, and that is all generated when we can get the widest audience of bidders, and that comes from reasonable pricing over pricing things as a death wish.”