Which Auction House Led The Pack In 2025?

The auction market's top tier ended 2025 with a familiar hierarchy, but the numbers suggest a more competitive year beneath the surface. Christie's generated $3.5 billion in fine-art auction sales, according to its year-end earnings report, a 10.1 percent increase from 2024. The total was still 9.8 percent below 2023, yet the house said the second half of 2025 brought a 26 percent jump in overall sales compared with the same period a year earlier.

The most expensive work sold by Christie's was Mark Rothko's No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), 1958, from the collection of Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis. The painting brought $62.1 million in November, underscoring the continued strength of blue-chip postwar abstraction at the top end of the market.

Sotheby's was close behind with $3.3 billion in fine-art sales, up 31 percent from 2024. That performance was helped by a series of high-profile single-owner collections, including the Lauder and Karpidas troves and Selma Ertegun's Surrealist holdings. Among the standout results was Frida Kahlo's El sueño (La cama), which sold for $54.7 million in November and set a record for a work by a woman artist at auction.

Phillips remained a distant third, reporting $390.9 million in fine-art sales, down 14.2 percent from 2024 and its lowest total since 2016. The house introduced a new priority fee structure in the fall, offering lower premiums to early bidders while increasing them for others. It also continued a period of leadership change: Martin Wilson became CEO in January 2025 after two executive shakeups the previous year.

The figures do not include private sales and reflect total revenue, not profit. Taken together, they point to a market still concentrated at the top, where a handful of trophy works and major collections continue to shape the year's outcome.

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