Source: Christie’s

Basquiat’s 1982 Untitled, a dynamic, monumental work measuring more than 16 feet wide and nearly eight feet tall, set a record at auction for the artist, selling for $57.3 million at Christie’s in New York in May 2016. Since 2012, Basquiat’s works, especially those from the early 1980s, have placed the artist at the top of the market.

Basquiat started his career in the 1980s doing graffiti around New York and quickly gained fame, appearing on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 1985. He was very productive, and his work was soon exhibited by renowned dealers such as Larry Gagosian and Mary Boone. Coming up at Sotheby’s on May 18, during the Contemporary Art Evening Auction, is another Untitled work from 1982 that will likely set a new record for the artist.

Source: Christie’s

One of the main figures of Pop Art, Roy Lichtenstein was strongly influenced by advertising, cartoons and popular imagery. In the 1964 Crying Girl, one of his earliest works in porcelain enamel on steel, Lichtenstein depicts a blonde girl wiping away a tear, leaving the viewer to wonder what put her in such state. The work, from an edition of five, fetched $13 million at Christie’s in New York in Nov. 2015, almost doubling its low estimate of $7 million.

Another of Lichtenstein’s girls—never seen on the market until now—will be leading Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction on May 18 in New York, with an estimate of $20 million. This time, the artist captures a happier scene suggested by the work’s title: Nude Sunbathing.

Source: Christie’s

At Christie’s in New York in 2013, Three Studies of Lucian Freud dethroned Edvard Munch’s Scream by selling for $142.4 million, setting a world record for an artwork at auction. The astonishing price could be linked to a number of factors, such as the work’s rarity and historical importance and the state of the market.

At the time the triptych was made, British artists Bacon and Lucian Freud were at the apogee of their friendship. They had become close toward the end of World War II and were inseparable in the 1950s. Freud’s wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, recalled, “I had dinner with [Francis Bacon] nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to Lucian. We also had lunch.”

The portrait of another key figure in Bacon’s life is coming up at auction on May 17 at Christie’s. Once belonging to Roald Dahl, Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer from 1963 is the first of many portraits Bacon painted of his lover and greatest muse, who appears in at least 40 of his works.

Source: Christie’s

Cy Twombly, a contemporary of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, embraced the tradition of abstract expressionism and painted Untitled toward the end of 1961. Part of a series of small-scale works, it fetched $2.3 million at Christie’s in London in 2013. Though he used different materials, that series shares the same energetic, vivid scribbling that also characterizes his Leda and the Swan.

A version of that painting will be hitting the auction block for the first time on May 17 at Christie’s, with an estimate of $35 million to $55 million. A sister painting with the same name sits in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection and is one of its most popular works.

Source: Christie’s

Marc Chagall, a Belarusian-born French artist who seduced the West with his poetic vision, painted The Bouquet près de la fenêtre from 1959 to 1960. The work, described by biographer Franz Meyer “as one of the finest flower paintings of this period,” fetched $5.1 million at Christie’s in London 2015. The large joyful flower bouquet that dominates the painting reflects the love of Chagall for his second wife, Valentina, whom he married after his beloved first wife Bella died. (Bella is also present, in the bottom-right corner, wearing a dreamy, white wedding dress.)

More than 15 works by Chagall will be sold at Sotheby’s in May.

Source: Christie’s

One of the first surrealists, Spanish artist Joan Miró painted Femme devant le soleil on July 7, 1938, a year of turmoil both for Spain—in the middle of the Civil War—and for the rest of Europe—with WWII at the door. Miró had to flee Spain and was living in France, but still felt the rising tensions and fears, which he expressed in his work.

“I sensed a catastrophe, and I didn’t know what it would be: it was the wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the World War. I tried to portray this tragic atmosphere that tormented me and that I felt inside me,” Miró said. It sold in February at Christie’s London Art of the Surreal sale.

Many works by Miro are coming up at May auctions.

Source: Sotheby’s

For the launch of Dom Pérignon Rosé 2003, Jeff Koons, perhaps best known for his Balloon Dog sculpture, created Balloon Venus, a reduced version of the Venus of Willendorf, a 4.4-inch-high female-figure statuette from the Palaeolithic era (made between 28,000 and 25,000 B.C.).

Koons’s 2013 purple Venus, made of lacquered polyurethane resin, is from an edition of 650, plus four artist’s proofs. The work, which had been estimated at $25,000 to $37,500, sold for $51,500 in April 2017.

Another Balloon Venus is coming up at the Contemporary Art Day Auction at Sotheby’s in New York on May 19. The estimate is $25,000 to $35,000.

Source: Christie’s

This painting represents a record for De Kooning (1904–1997), and was the top-selling lot of the November 2016 auction in which it featured. De Kooning, considered one of the giants of American modernism, is one of the most expensive artists on the market. His bright, gestural, often abstract (or almost abstract) paintings and drawings made him famous by the mid-1950s. His has become a mainstay of the global auction circuit.

This spring will be no exception. A work from the same year as Untitled XXV, in the same dimensions, is up for auction at Christie’s Postwar and contemporary evening sale, carrying an estimate of $25 to $35 million.

Source: Bonhams

Yet another artist at the pinnacle of American modernism, Calder (1898–1976) is perhaps the quintessential 20th century sculptor. His massive steel constructions serve as centerpieces in hundreds of plazas and corporate lobbies from Los Angeles to Mumbai; yet he also produced a vast body of work comprising living-room friendly objects.

Known particularly for Calder’s whimsical, almost impossibly asymmetrical mobiles and stabiles (a nice way of saying freestanding sculpture), his work has sold for increasingly lofty sums. This piece, meant to evoke a spider, is an example of Calder’s less whimsical, slightly more aggressive sculpture. It went for close to half-a-million dollars in 2014.

A similar piece executed about 10 years earlier is up for auction on May 18 at Sotheby’s evening sale in New York, carrying an estimate of $2 million to $3 million.

Source: Sotheby's

During his lifetime, Picasso (1881–1973) made tens of thousands of art objects.The immense variety of media in which he worked, and the extraordinary variety of editions, multiples, and methods with which he produced his objects, means that prices can run from a few thousand dollars to more than $100 million. This print, which sold in October, was made from a linoleum cut that was pressed onto woven paper and signed with a red crayon; only five exist.

A work up for auction at Sotheby’s this spring, in contrast, is a wholly original work, yet it’s less intricate and arguably less representative of his style. It is priced at a comparatively low $50,000 to $70,000.

Source: Christie’s

Monet (1840–1926) painted buildings, people, animals, and cities, and yet he’s probably best known for his bucolic landscapes. The artist’s signature impressionist style, with light, loose, painterly daubs, manages to capture the motion of light on water better than any photograph. This work, painted in 1874, depicts the River Seine in a town in the Paris suburbs, and sold just above its high estimate of 3 million pounds ($3.86 million) in February.

A similar landscape painting—depicting a more rural town about an hour outside Paris just a few years later—is up for sale at Sotheby’s New York in May. Perhaps due to the success of the last work, its estimate is a bit higher, at $4 million to $6 million.

Source: Sotheby’s

Rauschenberg (1925–2008) started off as a pop artist like Warhol, then expanded his scope, tackling issues of conceptual art, medium specificity, performance, dance, assemblage, and social advocacy. Generally speaking, Rauschenberg’s market better rewards his earlier works (though even paintings he produced in the 1990s sell for millions of dollars.) This massive painting sold last year at a contemporary day auction for above its high estimate of $450,000.

Still, when the painting is contrasted with an earlier, smaller work from 1961, its half-million dollar price looks more like a rounding error. On May 18, Sotheby’s will sell an oil, metal, rope, and wood composition that carries an estimate of $8 million to $12 million.

Source: Phillips

The recent subject of a massive retrospective that started at the Whitney Museum in New York and then traveled to Fort Worth and San Francisco, Stella is, at this point, one of the last living pillars of postwar contemporary art.

He became famous at an almost preposterously young age for his tight, geometric monochrome paintings; by the mid 1960s, though, he had embraced ebullient bursts of color. This diptych is an example of some of Stella's more user-friendly paintings: It sold for just below its low estimate at Phillips New York in 2015.

A work from a decade earlier that that one, consisting of gray, white, and black concentric stripes from 1966, is on sale at Sotheby’s. A single work rather than a diptych, it’s nonetheless priced more than a million dollars higher—it will hit the auction block on May 18, carrying an estimate of $3.5 million to $4.5 million.

Source: Sotheby’s

In his intense, short life, Schiele (1890–1918) managed to create a prolific number of drawings and paintings, most of which managed to make the human form grotesque (his own included) while simultaneously eroticizing it in a manner that continues to feel mildly scandalous more than a century later.

In recent years, prices for Schiele’s art have skyrocketed, in no small part due to the fact that most of his best art is already in museums’ permanent collections around the globe. Most of what’s currently on the market (in non-billionaire price ranges, at least) is Schiele’s work on paper. These two—a loose, evocative portrait of a woman in her undergarments with her rear exposed, and on the reverse, a crouching, fully naked woman—was estimated to sell for around $270,000 and sold for almost $100,000 more.

This year, a similar work—a watercolor— is up for auction at Sotheby’s on May 17, and it carries what might be a more realistic estimate of $300,000 to $500,000.