$60 M. Lichtenstein Comes To Christie's, Joining His Priciest Works

A 1964 canvas by Roy Lichtenstein is heading to Christie's with a $40 million to $60 million estimate, placing it among the most closely watched works in the house's May sales.“Anxious Girl” will lead Christie's marquee 20th-century art evening sale on May 18, and if it reaches the top of its estimate, it would become the artist's second-priciest work ever sold at public auction.

The painting comes from the collection of Holly Solomon and her husband Horace, a pair long associated with the New York Pop scene. The Solomons were important patrons and collectors of artists including Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol, and Holly Solomon herself became a subject for several artists. In 1966, Warhol made his nine-panel portrait of her; Lichtenstein later painted her in“I...I'm Sorry,” now in the collection of the Broad Museum in Los Angeles.

Christie's says“Anxious Girl” is one of only 10 works from 1963 to 1965 in which Lichtenstein concentrated on a woman's head. The image's face is derived from a 1963 DC Comics cover,“Girls' Romances 97,”“Too Much To Ask!,” while the skin is built from Ben-Day dots, the printing method Lichtenstein famously translated into hand-painted form. Sara Friedlander, chairman of postwar and contemporary art, called the work a“best-in-class example” of the artist from 1964, praising its ability to compress line, color, and form into a charged emotional image.

The sale also arrives at a moment when the auction market is showing signs of steadier footing. Christie's closed 2025 with $6.2 billion in global sales, up nearly 7 percent from the previous year, while Sotheby's reported $7 billion, a 17 percent increase and its strongest result on record. Both houses have also been lining up headline consignments for May, including Sotheby's $53 million Wingate collection and a $35 million Renoir at Christie's.

Lichtenstein's auction record remains $95.4 million for“Nurse” (1964), sold at Christie's New York in 2015. His second-highest auction price is $56.1 million for“Woman With Flowered Hat” (1963), and seven of his 10 top auction results date from the first half of the 1960s. With New York museums also turning back to Pop art - the Guggenheim Museum will open“Pop: 1960 to Now,” and the Whitney Museum will stage a Lichtenstein retrospective this fall - the market and the institutions appear to be moving in parallel.

For collectors,“Anxious Girl” is not just a trophy lot. It is a concentrated example of the period when Lichtenstein's visual language was becoming unmistakable, and when comic-book imagery was being transformed into one of the defining idioms of postwar art.

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