The 20 Most Expensive Artworks Coming to Auction in May 2026

Price tag: $30 million

Pop artist Andy Warhol may be better known for his paintings of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley (the subject of another work on this list), but he also produced plenty of works contending with the increasingly nonexistent divisions between “high” and “low” culture. This work mimics the format of a paint-by-numbers painting, with parts of the still life—depicting a violin and bowl of fruit—shown here already colored in. Once owned by storied collectors Emily and Burton Tremaine, the painting was later bought by S. I. Newhouse, whose estate is now selling it at Christie’s.

Price tag: $30 million

Unlike other lots on this list, Gray Target has only passed through two galleries—Leo Castelli and Mitchell-Innes & Nash—and had two owners—Ileana and Michael Sonnabend and S. I. Newhouse. As such, it was one of Newhouse’s most prized paintings: he only loaned it out twice after its 1998 acquisition, mostly recently for “Jasper Johns: Gray,” which focused on the artist’s use of the titular color and was co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Part of Johns’s seminal “Target” series from the mid-1950s, Gray Target shows that gray really does come in many different tones. Art historian Alan Solomon once called the hue Johns’s favorite color, adding, “For Johns, gray alone has always offered so great a potential as to be almost inexhaustible.”

Price tag: $35 million 

This is one of the 23 paintings of Elvis Presley that Warhol debuted in a storied 1963 exhibition at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Drawing on a still from the 1960 film Flaming Stars, Warhol screenprints Presley’s image two times over, with one of those times resulting in a spectral version of the King of Rock and Roll. The painting was once owned by collector Elaine Wynn, who bought it in 2012 for $37 million, then sold it in 2018 at Christie’s, where it went for $37 million, this time to the dealer Brett Gorvy. Heading to auction once more at Christie’s, the Warhol painting now has a high estimate of $35 million, which means that, when you adjust its past prices for inflation, the work has steadily declined in value.

Price tag: $35 million

This Renoir portrait once belonged to Alexandre Berthier, 4th Prince de Wagram, who in his short life amassed an impressive collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Notably, he donated 17 Renoirs to the French state upon his death at the age of 34 in 1918. La femme aux lilas, however, was not among Berthier’s beloved Reniors: he sold it in 1906, about 11 months after he purchased it. The work eventually made its way to Knoedler & Co., once the most storied art gallery in the US, which sold it to Joan Whitney and Charles Shipman Payson. Their daughter, Lorinda Payson de Roulet, who took over as president of the New York Mets after her mother’s death, inherited the work. Painted the same year as his now iconic Bal du moulin de la Galette, La femme aux lilas shows model Nini Lopez, who would feature in some 20 paintings by Renior made during the mid-1870s.

Price tag: $35 million

This painting’s ties to Surrealism run deep, and not only because it contains dreamy biomorphic forms similar to other works associated with the movement: the painter Max Ernst, himself a Surrealist, was the work’s first owner. In 2001, when S. I. Newhouse bought the work at Christie’s from the estate of collectors René and Jeanne Gaffé, Portrait de Madame K. became the most expensive Miró ever purchased at auction. Now, returning to Christie’s from Newhouse’s holdings, the painting looks to rake in as much as $35 million, putting it within striking distance of re-setting Miró’s current $36.9 million record, made in 2012.

Price tag: $35 million

Made shortly after de Kooning’s decampment from Manhattan to East Hampton, Untitled III comes from the period when the artist returned to oil painting in the mid-1970s. Measuring more than 7 by 6 feet, this all-over canvas features squiggles in hues like pale pink, mustard yellow, faded cerulean, cadmium red, and pine green—plus some strokes that mix some of those colors together. The work appeared in a 2004 Gagosian exhibition staged to mark the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth. In her New York Times review, critic Roberta Smith described the painting as having “comparatively workmanlike patches of color that are fairly constant in size and interval, as if the artist were trying to show Robert Ryman a thing or two.” Acquired in 2007 by its consignor, who was identified by Sotheby’s as only “an important private collection,” the work is one of the few top lots this season that has been on public view regularly in recent years, having been displayed in four different exhibitions at the Palm Springs Art Museum between 2007 and 2019.

Price tag: $40 million

One of multiple portraits Modigliani painted of the same Algerian woman, this one features his typical sharp black contours and almond-shaped eyes. The painting last sold at auction in 2001, at Phillips, where it sold for a healthy, if unremarkable, $7.1 million. It’s now headed back to sale at Christie’s with an estimate of more than five times that amount. The same collector has held this work for 25 years, though it’s unclear who that might be—the auction house hasn’t said. 

Price Tag: $40 million

For nearly 75 years, this 1909 Picasso canvas was held by Enrico Donati, a Surrealist painter who died in 2008, and his wife, Adele, who passed away last September. The couple paid around $12,000 for it in the 1940s. While its estimate of “in excess of $40 million” is more conservative than the ones for a couple other Picassos on offer this season, the figure is still $10 million more than the one Sotheby’s gave the painting on its last attempt to sell it, shortly after Enrico’s death. It headed to auction without a guarantee (despite rival Christie’s offering one to Adele), and was withdrawn shortly before the sale. This time around, the work has a guarantee and an irrevocable bid, as a Sotheby’s spokesperson confirmed to ARTnews last month. 

Made less than two years after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Arlequin (Buste) falls squarely in the period in which Picasso is refining his singular approach to Cubism, with the harlequin being among the artist’s favorite subjects. Art historian Theodore Reff, writing in Artforum in 1971, posited that Picasso’s interest in harlequins, with their diamond-patterned, multicolored uniforms, “are intimately related to Picasso’s most important formal invention, Cubism.” 

Price tag: $45 million

This painting notably appeared in a 1983 Gagosian show in Los Angeles that helped boost Basquiat’s fast-ascendant stardom. Like other highly prized Basquiats, this one contains scrawled phrases and motifs—including the artist’s signature skull—and obliquely addresses racism and class oppression, with the canvas including words such as “Hooverville” and “Priceless Art.” The work does, however, have a price—one that is about three times as much as the amount for which it last sold at auction, in 2013, at Christie’s. It’s now making its return to the house.

Price tag: $50 million

This brushy painting was made by Matisse while he was in Nice during the spring of 1938. After debuting at Paris’s Galerie Paul Rosenberg the year of its creation, Robe noir et robe violette showed at “The 1939 International Exhibition of Paintings” at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Katharine and Edward Bennett, Jr., of the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, purchased it in 1941 and loaned it to the Art Institute of Chicago multiple times, including once as a two-decade-long span. 

Price tag: $50 million

Though best known on the market for his abstractions made using squeegees, Richter is equally beloved for his figurative works, most notably his “Kerze” series, featuring smudgy images of candles burning in pallid, vacant interiors. (One became the cover of a Sonic Youth album.) Richter has said that the paintings were political for him: in East Germany, candles acted as “a silent protest against the regime.” This one comes to sale at Christie’s from his longtime dealer, Marian Goodman, who died in January, and seems likely to fell Richter’s auction record.

Price tag: $55 million

Another work coming from the Newhouse collection, this one was acquired from Mitchell-Innes & Nash in 2000. It was previously owned by former Guggenheim Museum director James Johnson Sweeney and French dealer Léonce Rosenberg, who received it as a gift directly from the artist. Johnson Sweeney exhibited at the Guggenheim in an exhibition titled “Piet Mondrian: The Early Years” in 1957; it was last seen in public in a 1969 Mondrian survey at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. Created four years after Mondrian first proposed Neo-Plasticism as an art theory, Composition with Large Red Plane, Blue, Gray, Black and Yellow comes as “Mondrian’s visual vocabulary crystallized into its definitive form,” according to art historian John Milner, per the catalog essay. 

Price tag: $55 million

Per Picasso’s title, this painting represents a man with a guitar, but the instrument’s player is barely visible amid a pile-up of geometric forms that is typical of the Cubist aesthetic, which the artist often used to envision one subject as though it were seen from many perspectives at once. Picasso’s Cubist paintings are highly prized, both by art historians and marketeers. This one was once owned by the poet Gertrude Stein, then entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art following her death. Therein ensued some controversy. In 2000, MoMA decided to sell the painting and consigned it to Gagosian gallery. What the museum didn’t expect was that S. I. Newhouse, a board member, then went on to purchase the work for himself, a move that the New York Post described as an “insider sale.” Newhouse subsequently resigned from the board; he died in 2017, and this painting now comes to sale from his estate.

Price tag: $60 million

One of just two sculptures to crack the top 20 happens to be by Picasso, whose sculptures rarely sell for quite so much money. Tête de femme (Fernande) was first created in clay in 1909 at the height of the artist’s Cubist period. It depicts Fernande Olivier, an artist who became Picasso’s first live-in romantic partner; the two had met in 1904 at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre and she would serve as his muse—and the subject of numerous artworks—for several years, during both his Rose and Cubist periods. This version, which at one point belonged to dealer Ambroise Vollard, last sold at auction in 2001, where it fetched $4.5 million at auction, setting a record for a Picasso sculpture. 

Price tag: $60 million

Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein is having a Whitney Museum retrospective later this year, though that’s only one reason Christie’s has priced this painting so highly. Its provenance appears to have added value: the painting was once owned by the beloved New York dealer Holly Solomon and her husband Horace. Christie’s hasn’t specified the current seller of this painting, which is based on a similar image that appeared on the cover of a DC Comics publication. In typical Lichtenstein fashion, an array of circles line much of the composition, mimicking the Ben-Day dots that are commonly seen at a smaller scale in images that appear in the mass media.

Price tag: $60 million

This untitled painting by Cy Twombly is the first of two pricey lots on this list owned by Agnes Gund, the late collector and philanthropist who served as president of MoMA’s board for more than a decade. The work was first owned by Pierre Janlet, at the time the director general of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; after purchasing it by 1964, Janlet would show it at his museum in a solo exhibition for Twombly in 1965. The work was eventually consigned to New York gallery Stephen Mazoh & Co., where Gund bought it in 1988. This canvas was painted in Rome the same year as other Twombly works now owned by major museums, like Triumph of Galatea (Menil Collection, Houston) and The First Part of the Return from Parnassus (Art Institute of Chicago). “The transformation completed in these paintings,” catalogue raisonné editor Heiner Bastian writes of Twombly’s 1961 works, “shatters with weightless epigrammatic analogy of those limpid flashes and lingering appropriations and detects a fervent expression in the tragedy and metamorphosis of mutating, ever fateful identities.”

Price tag: around $80 million

Rothko was among the artists that Gund personally befriended. She even bought this seven-foot-tall abstraction following a visit to the Abstract Expressionist’s studio, making it one of the select few works purchased directly by a collector from the artist still held privately, according to Christie’s, which will now sell the work. Following Gund’s death last year, the painting is coming to auction at a price of around $80 million, poising the canvas to become one of the most expensive Rothkos ever sold.

Price tag: $100 million

It’s a three-way tie for the priciest lot of this year’s May auctions. First up is Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A (1948), which, at nearly 11 feet wide, is likely also the most horizontal canvas coming to market this spring. The canvas debuted in Pollock’s 1949 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery and would soon be gifted to photographer Herbert Matter by the artist. It would eventually wind up in the important postwar art collection John and Kimiko Powers in 1967, before being owned by A. Alfred Taubman, the onetime owner of Sotheby’s. S. I. Newhouse bought it from Taubman in 2000. According to Christie’s catalog essay, Number 7A is the largest of Pollock’s “drip” paintings left in private hands and one that is rarely exhibited, having last been seen publicly in a 1977 exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Writing in the Nation shortly after that Parsons exhibition, Clement Greenberg said the exhibition “continued his astounding progress. The general quality that emerged from such pictures seemed more than enough to justify the claim that Pollock is one of the major painters of our time.”

Price tag: $100 million

Like many sculptures by Brâncuși, this one pares down a familiar form to its basics, crafting a human face from little more than a gold-leafed orb of bronze, with two arcing lines and a small dash to respectively communicate a face and mouth. That human face is thought to have been influenced by that of Margit Pogany, a Hungarian art student who regularly acted as a model for the Romanian modernist. Danaïde last sold in 2002 for $18.2 million at Christie’s, where it was bought on behalf of S. I. Newhouse, minting a record for both the artist and any sculpture ever publicly sold at auction. Headed back to sale at more than five times that amount following Newhouse’s death in 2017, the piece could re-set the former benchmark, though it’s not likely to upend the latter, which stands at $141.3 million, for an Alberto Giacometti sculpture sold in 2015.

Price tag: $100 million

Tied for the season’s priciest lot is Mark Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957), which comes to the secondary market via the collection of the late financier-turned-dealer Robert Mnuchin. This Rothko is emblematic of the postwar artist’s mature period, featuring a dark red background in which three blurred rectangles of brown, bright red, and black fade into each other the longer you stare at it. The canvas also has a storied provenance, having been sold by Rothko’s dealer at the time, Sidney Janis, to the Seagram Collection, which hung it in the lobby of New York’s Seagram Building, and prompted the company to commission Rothko’s famed Seagram Murals. 

Shortly after the French entertainment conglomerate Vivendi bought Seagram, it put Brown and Blacks in Reds up for auction at Christie’s New York in 2003, where it sold for just $6.7 million (about $12.1 million in today’s dollars). It was the second highest sum paid at that sale, which was led by another Rothko, 1958’s No. 9 (White and Black on Wine), which was consigned by François Pinault, and also scooped up by Mnuchin for $16.3 million. 

Now, Mnuchin’s estate is looking to turn a major profit on the work 23 years later. If it sells for the high estimate of $100 million, that would work out to 15 times its past figure. While its low estimate of $70 million would, if achieved, only have the work crack Rothko’s top five auction results (not accounting for the Gund Rothko mentioned above which hits the block four days after this one), the high estimate of $100 million would, if realized, make it the priciest Rothko ever sold at auction, besting his Orange, red, yellow (1961), which sold for $86.9 million in 2012 (about $125 million in today’s money).