Published: 05 May 2026
The nineteenth century brought with it a seismic rupture in the history of Western art. In the studios and salons of Paris, a generation of painters began to turn away from the polished certainties of academic tradition, reaching instead for the fleeting qualities of everyday life: the shimmer of light on water, the blur of a crowd in motion, the feeling of a moment before it passed. Impressionism was not merely a stylistic departure; it was a philosophical one, a declaration that perception itself was a worthy subject for painting.
What followed was a century of restless reinvention. The avant-garde movements of the twentieth century built upon that initial rupture and pushed it further, fracturing form, destabilising perspective, and surrendering the canvas to the logic of dreams and pure feeling.
With summer approaching, Sotheby's is pleased to welcome collectors and devoted admirers of modern art to explore a collection of rare breadth. Over a century of paintings, drawings, and sculpture drawn from across Europe and the Americas, spanning the Impressionist breakthrough to the revolutionary avant-garde movements that followed, are set to go under the hammer this May in New York.
Here's what to know before the hammer falls.
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The Auction
The collection will be on display at Sotheby's New York from Saturday 2nd May to Monday 18th May, open to visitors from 10 AM to 5 PM. The live auction follows on Wednesday, 20th May, divided into two sessions: the first covering lots 301 to 440, and the second, covering lots 501 to 610.
Auction Highlights
1. Pablo Picasso’s Buste d'homme barbu (Bearded Man Bust) | Estimate: $2,000,000 – $3,000,000
In 1961, Picasso married Jacqueline Roque and settled with her at Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie, a villa tucked into the hills above Cannes. Away from the pressures of his public life, he entered one of the most intensely productive periods of his late career, one that scholars have since described as his 'Heroic Years'. It was in this sanctuary that he painted Buste d'homme barbu, which translates to Bearded Man Bust, in March 1965, at the age of eighty-three.
The work belongs to a series of male portraits that occupied Picasso deeply in his final decade. These figures, bearded and commanding, drew on the archetypes of musketeers and Golden Age noblemen, but beneath the swagger lay something far more personal. Picasso once confided that every man he drew brought his father to mind, and these portraits are understood as meditations on identity, ageing, and legacy. The face in Buste d'homme barbu is built from swift, decisive brushstrokes over fields of white, reducing the human form to its expressive essentials. What emerges is striking: a figure of considerable presence, anchored by the mirada fuerte (strong gaze), that recurs throughout his late portraiture and is widely read as Picasso projecting himself onto the figure.
The work has changed hands seven times. It last appeared at auction in 2005, selling at Christie's for $1.05 million. It was most recently acquired in 2018 through Helly Nahmad Gallery, London, and carries a current estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000, a figure that places its lower bound 185% above its previous estimate of $700,000.
2. Wassily Kandinsky’s Poids monté | Estimate: $1,500,000 - $2,000,000
When the Bauhaus – a leading German school of art, architecture, and design – was forced to close under mounting fascist pressure in 1933, Wassily Kandinsky and his wife, Nina, left Germany and resettled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a quiet suburb of Paris, where he would live and work until his death in 1944. The move marked a turning point in his art. The precise geometry and architectural rigour that had defined his Bauhaus years began to loosen, giving way to something more fluid, shaped by a growing fascination with biology, cosmology, and the microscopic structures of living matter. Growth, gestation, and transformation became central preoccupations, and the processes by which things come into being began to surface across his canvases.
At the centre of Poids monté, a clean geometric circle extends into an amorphous tail, the combined form resembling something microbiological or embryonic, as though glimpsed under a microscope. Behind it, a trapezoidal plane tilts through the composition, pushing the eye upward, a movement carried through by the pink and lilac ellipses on the right. The blacks and whites framing the central elements flatten and deepen the canvas in equal measure, creating a sense of movement across the surface.
The work was acquired from a private collection in Japan in the 1990s by its current owner and carries an estimate of $1,500,000 to $2,000,000.
3. René Magritte’s Le Compotier | $800,000 - $1,200,000
By 1958, Belgian Surrealist René Magritte was in the midst of one of the most productive stretches of his career. The catalyst was a contract signed two years earlier with dealer Alexandre Iolas, which granted him an annual retainer in exchange for first refusal on new works and exclusive rights in the United States. The arrangement proved transformative: that year alone Magritte completed twenty-seven oil paintings and more than a dozen gouaches, among them Le Compotier.
The work belonged to a sustained inquiry Magritte had been conducting since the 1940s, in which familiar objects were stripped of their ordinary logic and placed in contexts that made them strange. Fruit appeared across his canvases with increasing frequency during this period, sometimes monumental and overpowering, sometimes weightless and adrift. The apple was a particular obsession, recurring across numerous compositions. In Le Compotier, however, Magritte substitutes a pear in its place, while preserving the same polished, bright green surface, a subtle act of replacement that typifies his delight in transformation and his eye for the uncanny within the mundane. The motif was likely drawn not from life but from a botanical or fruit catalogue, several of which were found among his personal effects after his death.
Rendered with a meticulous, almost clinical exactness reflective of his former career as a commercial graphic artist, the pear's presence in the bowl feels subtly wrong. This was precisely the point. As Magritte wrote in his collected writings, ordinary objects fascinated him not despite their familiarity but because of it, as vehicles for a strangeness that conventional perception tends to overlook.
Iolas, who had a reputation for an exceptionally sharp eye, kept the companion oil painting for his own collection. The gouache sold to Bodley Gallery within two months of completion, suggesting it had found a buyer before it even left the studio.
4. Edward Hopper’s Monhegan Lighthouse | $1,200,000 - $1,800,000
New England was not incidental to American realist painter Edward Hopper's art. It was central to it. From his early summers in Maine to a lifelong attachment to Cape Cod, the region provided him with the motifs he would spend a career transforming into icons of American painting. Among these, the lighthouse proved especially enduring, appearing in his work for decades that followed. When he appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1956, the illustrator placed a lighthouse behind him.
Monhegan Island, located ten miles off the Maine coast, had long drawn American painters for its rugged shoreline and open Atlantic light. Hopper first visited in the summer of 1916 and returned consecutively through 1919, producing thirty-two recorded oils across those years. The majority focus on waves breaking against rocky bluffs, but Monhegan Lighthouse is among only two from the series to turn toward the island's built environment rather than its pure landscape. The lighthouse sits at the centre of the composition, rendered with heightened shadow, careful architectural detail, and a strong sense of texture in the foreground. It is considered one of the most masterful works from this early and defining period in his career.
The influence of these Monhegan pictures extended well beyond Hopper himself. His blending of realism with something approaching abstraction in these works left a discernible mark on later American painters.
Monhegan Lighthouse was acquired by a private New York collection by 1974 and has since passed by descent to the present owner. It makes its first appearance at public auction with an estimate of $1,200,000 to $1,800,000.
Final Thoughts
Each work here belongs to a different world: different continents, different philosophies, and different departures from tradition. That a single sale can hold them all is a testament to how much one century of art contained.
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