Art History News

The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction in November 2026 will feature artworks which capture the paradigmatic artistic shifts of the latter half of the 20th century through to the present. Beginning with Postwar abstraction and moving through Minimalism and Pop into the critical postmodern inquiries of the 1980s through to today, these radical new modes of art-making fundamentally altered the course of art history. Spotlighting these developments within a unified platform, the masterworks of The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction call into focus the plurality of visions, identities and artistic innovations that have reshaped the trajectory of art history as we know it. These works and more will be viewable at Sotheby’s New York this November.

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Beginning this November, Sotheby’s will offer some 50 works from the exceptional collection of Richard (“Dick”) and the late Elizabeth (“Betty”) Hedreen. Devoted philanthropists, active supporters of their native Seattle and Washington State, and passionate collectors for six decades, the Hedreens can rightly be considered pioneers, who were among the very first to place considerable emphasis on the visual and intellectual dialogues inherent in juxtaposing art from across the ages, assembling a collection that spans the 15th century to the present day.

The collection will be led by 11 Contemporary masterworks from Sam Francis, to Roy Lichtenstein, to Cecily Brown. This will be offered alongside a broad range of other works in a variety of media across The New York Sales this November, followed by a dedicated Old Masters auction in New York, February 2027.

View 1 of Lot 4: Reflections on “Painter and Model”

Type: lot
Roy Lichtenstein
Reflections on “Painter and Model”
Estimate: 20,000,000 – 30,000,000 USD

Type: lot
Cecily Brown
Untitled (Shipwreck)
Estimate: 7,000,000 – 10,000,000 USD

View 1 of Lot 7: Towards Disappearance I

Type: lot
Sam Francis
Towards Disappearance I
Estimate: 15,000,000 – 20,000,000 USD

View 1 of Lot 9: Water...Soft Banks and a Window (Untitled VIII)

Type: lot
Willem de Kooning
Water...Soft Banks and a Window (Untitled VIII)
Estimate: 20,000,000 – 30,000,000 USD

View 1 of Lot 3: Japanese Garden with Moon and Stars

Type: lot
Jonas Wood
Japanese Garden with Moon and Stars
Estimate: 3,000,000 – 5,000,000 USD

For Lenore and Bernard Greenberg, art in every form was part of their lives. Lenore served as a board president of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Bernard was a founder and chairman of the LA Opera, and together they were devoted supporters of the LA Philharmonic as well as the Public Library. For Lennie and Bernie, as they were familiarly known, art held the inimitable power to transform a community. Through historic gifts, measured leadership, and a singular philanthropic spirit, the Greenbergs helped shape Los Angeles: its sound, its cultural landscape, its civic institutions, and collective imagination. As they upheld Los Angeles’ public arts and culture, so, too, did they build a collection of brilliant, timeless rigor to be enjoyed in the privacy of their home. These works take center stage this November at Sotheby's.

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View 1 of Lot 106: Suzhou, Before and After

Type: lot
Brice Marden
Suzhou, Before and After
Estimate: 6,000,000 – 8,000,000 USD

View 1 of Lot 107: White Relief with Black II

Type: lot
Ellsworth Kelly
White Relief with Black II
Estimate: 1,800,000 – 2,500,000 USD

Type: lot
Martin Puryear
Yearn
Estimate: 500,000 – 700,000 USD

Type: lot
Agnes Martin
Desert
Estimate: 6,000,000 – 8,000,000 USD

Type: lot
Kelpie
Estimate: 800,000 – 1,200,000 USD

This May, Sotheby's is thrilled to offer a major Flowers by Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol’s Flowers is an exceptionally rare and preeminent example of one of the artist’s most celebrated and iconic series. One of only seven 48-by-48-inch flower paintings on a stark white background, Flowers is one of the most visually distilled and desirable works from a series that represents a decisive moment in Warhol’s formal and conceptual engagement with mass culture and art history; thus, the present work represents one of the clearest assertions of Warhol's pop authority.

Crowd of people at the opening of the Art Museum of South Texas in Dallas featuring Andy Warhol's Flowers. Photo by Jim Olive/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images. Art © 2026 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Begun in 1964 and finished in 1965, only a year after Warhol’s debut exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, the present work encapsulates the singularity of Warhol’s practice and career; made using his quintessential appropriation of mass-produced imagery, it is conceptually daring in its lifting of preexisting source material and formally striking in both its harmonic spatial balance and brilliant chromatic tension.

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Andy Warhol
Flowers
Estimate: 10,000,000 – 15,000,000 USD

In 1961, just a few years after moving to the United States, Kusama would participate in the Whitney’s 1961 Annual Exhibition of contemporary sculpture and painting. Alongside peers from the New York School, Kusama was here contextualized at the fore of the American avant-garde, along with artists such as Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Philip Guston. Each artist presented an artwork, and the present work was Kusama’s.

Among the earliest, largest, and most significant examples from the series, notably distinguished for its inclusion in one of Kusama’s earliest institutional presentations in the United States at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1961, No. 3P.B. marks both a point of genesis and a concluding statement: a technique mastered early yet endlessly generative, a visual language and ideological thesis fecund with reinventive possibility. The present work stands as one of the earliest mature Infinity Nets, in which Kusama’s signature painterly mode reaches its fullest evolution.