Happy New Year, dear reader!

This is the time of year when I look at the last 12 months of data, compiled by my colleagues with the Artnet Price Database, to make sense of what happened and what it means for the year ahead.

Let’s start with good news.

There’s a new king atop the list of 500 artists at auction that Artnet compiles annually. Welcome René Magritte, the Belgian Surrealist, who dethroned Pablo Picasso with the highest auction total for 2024: $312.3 million. In 2023, Magritte ranked seventh, with $192.7 million. Curiously, the $120 million difference between 2023 and 2024 is basically the price of a single work, Magritte’s 1954 Empire of Light  painting, which fetched $121 million at Christie’s in November, the top lot of the year.

That fact provides a useful prism through which to look at some changes in the rankings, especially at the very high end. One trophy painting can move the needle in a big way. Fewer works by Magritte actually came up for sale in 2024 (119 lots) than in 2023 (134 lots).

Adrien Meyer, Christie’s global head of private sales and co-head of Impressionist and Modern art, sells the top lot of the evening, René Magritte’s L’Empire des Lumières, for $121.2 million. Courtesy Christie’s.

This prism may also be useful looking at the Picasso market, which, to be frank, plummeted, even though the artist’s ranking dropped by just two slots. The prolific Spaniard ranked third in 2024 with $221.6 million in sales, 63 percent less than a year earlier, when his works made $597.2 million.

Let this sink in: 63 percent down. Picasso. Wow. That’s the lowest annual total for the artist since 2009, the year after the financial crisis struck, in an entirely different market. Should we be worried?

I asked David Nahmad, the patriarch of the powerful art world dynasty and one of the most bullish Picasso investors out there. He just laughed. “I wish it will go down, I wish,” he said. “If Picasso goes down, you should buy it. It will go back up.”

Vincent Van Gogh, Coin de Jardin avec Papillons, 1887. Courtesy of Christie’s.

So what’s the reason for the drop at auction?

“There have not been great Picassos on the market,” Nahmad said. “People speak about prices, but prices depend on availability. Supply is more important than the prices. How many years there hasn’t been a Van Gogh in the market, a serious Van Gogh? Maybe 20 years. But you are not going to say that Van Gogh is down because it doesn’t sell at auction.”

(To wit: The $82.5 million paid for Van Gogh’s Portrait du Dr. Gachet, 1890, remained the highest price recorded at auction from 1990 until 2022, when a landscape from Paul Allen’s collection sold for $117.2 million. In 2024, Van Gogh ranked 14th, with $77 million in sales, and just two paintings accounted for most of the tally.)

Fewer works by Picasso came up for sale in 2024 (3,139 lots) than in 2023 (3,216 lots). The average lot price decreased even more, to $85,833 from $218,215. Of course 2023 saw the second-highest Picasso sale at auction, for Femme à la Montre (1932), from the collection of Emily Fisher-Landau, which fetched $139.4 million at Sotheby’s. That’s more than the top 10 Picasso lots generated in 2024 (that’s $127.9 million, to be precise).

Pablo Picasso, La Statuaire (1925). Photo: Katya Kazakina

The priciest Picasso in 2024 was La Statuaire (1925), which made $24.8 million. The canvas came from Sydell Miller’s estate and depicted a rare subject for the artist: a female artist. It was not your typical Picasso, not very bravado and painterly, almost uptight and cartoonish, but interesting all the same as a transition from his Neoclassical period to his Marie-Thérèse period.

“I love it personally, but it’s not a very easy painting,” Nahmad said. “I wanted to pay $20 million, all inclusive. It’s very close to Surrealism. People don’t understand this painting. The one from Fisher-Landau was easier to understand. To buy this painting you have to have at least five other Picassos.”

The art market contraction manifested itself in many ways, including the delta between the totals for the top artist. Allow me to remind you that, in 2023, first-place Picasso made $597.2 million in sales. In 2024, Magritte hauled in $312.3 million. That’s a $284 million (or 47.7 percent) gap.

Consider that the second-place artist, Claude Monet, generated $293.4 million in 2024, advancing five spots in the ranking, after totaling $197.2 million in 2023.

Meanwhile, the second-ranked artist of 2023, China’s Zhag Daqian (1899-1983) dropped 11 spots, from $285.9 million to $75.9 million, in sales in 2024.

Chinese artists of all stripes took a beating in 2024, with eviscerated sale totals and massive drops in rankings.

Liu Ye, Wind (2004). Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.

Take Liu Ye, the contemporary Beijing-based painter known for his figurative pictures of childlike female characters. He dropped 100 spots, while his auction revenue, $8.7 million, was a fifth of what it was a year earlier. Or take Ming dynasty calligrapher Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), who went from $28 million in auction sales in 2023 to $6.4 million in 2024, a drop of 115 in the ranking. Many others are in the same boat.

Sales declined for lots of female artists last year, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, Cecily Brown, and Julie Mehretu. Yayoi Kusama, while finishing sixth, dropped to $155 million in total sales from $190.5 million in 2023. Joan Mitchell, who ranked 11th, saw a drop from $112.3 million to $102.2 million in sales.

Leonora Carrington was among the bright spots, ranking 25th with $53.6 million in sales, up from ​​$3 million a year ago. Leading the results was her 1945 painting Les Distractions de Dagobert, which went for $28.5 million in May, a new record for the British-born artist. Six months later, one of her sculptures, La Grande Dame (The Cat Woman) (1951), sold at Sotheby’s New York for $11.4 million. Another painting, Temple of the Word (1954), went for $4.6 million.

Leonora Carrington, Les Distractions de Dagobert, 1945. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

How collectors and investors interpret these figures remains to be seen. Big estates will determine the supply of works at auction. Meanwhile, amid so much market uncertainty, the biggest sales may happen privately.

@john_sayeghbelchatowski/Instagram

I was reminded of this by a recent Instagram post from collector-dealer John Sayegh-Belchatowski heralding a $130 million sale of Basquiat’s 1982 painting Baptisimal. The work belonged to fashion designer Valentino Garavani, according to industry insiders. The word on the street is that Christie’s sold it, which would make sense. In 2023, Garavani sold Basquiat’s 1983 El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile), also known as Untitled (The History of Black People), for $67 million at Christie’s. The house also sold his partner Giancarlo Giammetti’s Basquiat, In This Case (1983), for $93.1 million in 2021.

I am not able to confirm this reported transaction, and Christie’s declined to comment. Its private sales reached $1.5 billion in 2024, up 41 percent from the prior year.

At auction, Basquiat ranked fourth, with $184.7 million in total sales in 2024, a 23 percent drop from 2023. His highest price last year was $46.5 million. Here’s to a better supply of prized works in the future.