Acquired in 1986, Joan Mitchell’s Green Book of Barbara Guest has remained in the extraordinary collection of Theodore and Ruth Baum for four decades. It will make its auction debut this November, and will appear on public view for the first time in six decades.

Executed in 1960 at a pivotal moment in the artist’s career, the painting stands as an exceptional example from the onset of Mitchell’s most highly celebrated period. The title references Mitchell’s friend, art critic, and poet Barbara Guest, marking a rare example of a title which provides a glimpse into the artist’s inner circle. In 1959, Mitchell moved to Paris, and in 1960, she published a book of poems in collaboration with John Ashbery. Executed at this pivotal moment of increased productivity and creative innovation, Green Book of Barbara Guest embodies the vigorous, poetic energy that marked a new stage in Mitchell’s artistic development, with her early 1960s paintings reflecting a newfound surge of motion.

Acquired in 1983, Untitled was the first Contemporary artwork to enter the Baum collection, ushering in over two decades of passionate collecting.The fiery red and brilliant tangerine work demonstrates Mark Rothko’s command of color to communicate the breadth of human emotion.

Perhaps above all others, red is the most important color to Rothko: symbolically and aesthetically. The brilliant palette of the present work offers a rare glimpse of radiant color in the context of the final years of the artist’s life. Red features prominently throughout the collection of Theodore and Ruth Baum, as seen in Rothko’s Untitled; Ellsworth Kelly’s bold Red White; Lucio Fontana’s searing red, slashed canvas Concetto spaziale, Attese; Ed Ruscha’s audacious red palette in Dimple; and more.

Throughout his career, Roy Lichtenstein reinterpreted scenes from the art historical canon through his distinctive lens. In 1988, Lichtenstein began his Reflections series, exploring the act of looking itself. Lichtenstein superimposed abstracted reflection streaks across his compositions, which partially obscure the underlying scene to draw attention to the viewer's relationship to the work.

Created in 1990, Lichtenstein’s Reflections on “Painter and Model” boldly reimagines Picasso’s Cubist masterpiece Painter and Model from 1928—which is held in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York—in his signature Ben-Day dots, bold graphic contours and vibrant palette.

The work was included in Lichtenstein’s landmark retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1993, and has been held in the Hedreen Collection for over three decades. Its appearance at auction coincides with Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, the major retrospective which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York this October.

Executed in 1960, No.3P.B. is an early, rare, and monumental masterwork from Yayoi Kusama’s most significant body of paintings: her Infinity Nets. No. 3P.B is distinguished by its inclusion in one of the artist’s first institutional presentations in the United States: the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1961 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary painting and sculpture. The show featured the generation’s leading creative voices—such as Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Georgia O’Keeffe—with each artist exhibiting one painting.

Among the earliest true Infinity Nets, this extraordinarily large and brilliant crimson painting explores many of the same themes that Kusama would return to throughout her career. It features highly modulated, dynamic brushwork, which gives the work a sense of swelling movement heightened by rich impasto peaks.

Works from this critical early period are exceedingly rare, and are widely represented in institutional collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, among many others.

Executed in 1964, Helen Frankenthaler’s Empire is a luminous testament to the artist’s revolutionary approach to color, gesture and abstraction. Monumental in scale, the composition exemplifies the extraordinary fluidity and spontaneity of Frankenthaler’s celebrated practice, as expansive passages of electric cobalt blue and verdant green envelop a rich, deep violet center.

Particularly exceptional is the work’s remarkable provenance, having been gifted directly by Frankenthaler in 1964 to Leonard Bocour, the pioneering paint manufacturer whose innovative acrylic pigments helped transform the possibilities of postwar American painting. Emerging from the distinguished collection of Barry Goldberg, where it has been treasured for over three decades, Empire now makes its first appearance on the market, offering collectors an exceptional opportunity to acquire a masterpiece from a pivotal moment in Frankenthaler’s career.

Brice Marden’s Untitled Red and Green Drawing 6 from 1998 is a captivating example of the artist’s celebrated exploration of line, color and gesture. A dynamic interplay of sinuous, interwoven forms unfolds across the composition, as vibrant passages of red and green create an intricate visual rhythm that embodies the meditative energy and expressive freedom of Marden’s mature practice.

The work reflects the artist’s profound engagement with the expressive possibilities of drawing, balancing spontaneous movement with a deeply considered sense of structure and harmony. Emerging from the distinguished collection of Richard Hedreen, who acquired the work the very year of its execution, this exceptional drawing has remained in the same collection for nearly three decades and now makes its first appearance on the market since its acquisition.

Few works more eloquently affirm Beverly Grossman’s lasting impact as a champion of modern and contemporary art than Andy Warhol's Beverly [Six Works] from 1982. Among the most consequential achievements of Warhol's career, his portraits fundamentally reshaped notions of fame, visibility, and cultural status. His commissioned portraits occupy a particularly significant place within this practice, charting a diverse social landscape that ranged from Hollywood celebrities, athletes, and drag performers to influential figures within the art world, such as Grossman. These commissions offered Warhol an opportunity not only to refine and expand his artistic language, but also to gain access to the rarefied circles of influence, wealth, and social prestige inhabited by his sitters.

Among the most acclaimed sculptural undertakings of Yoshitomo Nara's career, The Little Pilgrims (Night Walking) hail from a defining moment in which the artist's iconic cast of characters moved beyond the painted surface and into the viewer's physical realm. Rarely encountered as a complete set, this ensemble consists of five exquisitely realized figures, each distinguished by individual attire. Together, they encapsulate Nara's exploration of sleep, consciousness, and childhood imagination. Occupying a threshold between inward contemplation and outward journeying, these wandering sleepwalkers evoke the curiosity and wonder of the transition from childhood into adulthood.

Executed in 1973, just one year before the artist's death, Adolph Gottlieb's Splatter is a commanding expression of the elemental dynamism and extraordinary painterly force that define his celebrated oeuvre. Juxtaposing three suspended orbs against an explosive constellation of gestural splatters and sweeping calligraphic brushtrokes, the present work exemplifies the distinctive visual language that Gottlieb cultivated throughout his career.

Unseen in public for more than sixty years, Châtaigniers en fleurs is a masterpiece by Vincent van Gogh completed in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise in France, where he spent the final two months of his life. Poised to set a new auction record, the luminous, vigorously worked canvas is among the most exceptional Post-Impressionist paintings ever to come to the market. The work belongs to a period of extraordinary creative intensity after the artist spent the previous year confined to the psychiatric asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Van Gogh arrived in Auvers with a renewed sense of optimism, writing of the “beautiful greenery in abundance” and his conviction that “the desire to work will devour me and make me insensible to everything else and in a good mood.” In the weeks that followed, he painted with astonishing urgency, completing a series of emotionally charged, visually arresting works that rank among the most celebrated and sought-after of his career.

Arlequin belongs to a very rare group of Harlequin paintings Paul Cézanne made between 1888 and 1890, a sequence of only four works that has long been recognized as one of the most impressive portrait projects of the artist’s career. The only example from this series remaining in private hands, this painting—unseen in public since 1975—is expected to establish a new auction record for the artist. Before entering the Blaquier-Arrieta Collection, the painting was exhibited in the many of the greatest Cézanne exhibitions ever staged, including at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1907; at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1929; at Tate in London in 1954, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952.

Never before offered at auction and unseen in public since 1958, Camille Pissarro’s 1898 painting La Place du Théâtre-Français et l’avenue de l’Opéra, soleil d’après-midi en hiver belongs to the celebrated series of Paris cityscapes that the artist produced during the final decade of his career, widely considered among the most important achievements in Impressionism.

Painted during the artist’s third stay in Paris, the work is one of a select group of canvases depicting the Place du Théâtre-Français and the avenue de l’Opéra, where Pissarro shifted his focus from the rural subjects that had established his reputation to the rhythms of modern urban life.

1876 marked the year that Claude Monet began to turn his attention from the idyllic landscapes that had previously preoccupied him to the newly built boulevards of Paris and the sweep of city life. Le Jardin des Tuileries, one of Monet’s celebrated Impressionist Paris scenes, belongs to a suite of four views painted that year from the same vantage point: a fifth floor apartment on the Rue de Rivoli—lent to Monet by one of the great patrons of Impressionism, Victor Chocquet—from which he could absorb the full expanse of Baron Haussmann’s newly designed modern metropolis, or ‘spectacular Paris’, as Monet described it.

Works by Monet depicting Paris rarely appear on the market, with the majority housed in museum collections—of the four views painted from Chocquet’s apartment, Le Jardin des Tuileries is one of only two remaining in private hands, with other examples from this series residing in the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.

Not publicly exhibited since 1968, Avant la course is one of the largest fully-worked pastels depicting horseracing by Edgar Degas remaining in private hands. Never before seen at auction, it is also the most significant horseracing pastel to come to market in at least forty years.

Horses were among Degas’s most celebrated and enduring subjects—one he returned to for nearly the entirety of his working life. Here, he captures the tense stillness of the moments before a race, the horses arranged in such a way that the composition reads as a fleeting glance rather than an orchestrated scene.

Painted in 1877—the year Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his fellow artists formally adopted the term “Impressionist” at the Third Impressionist Exhibition—En Canot (Jeune fille à la barque) is one of only a handful of Renoir’s celebrated boating scenes from the 1870s that remain in private hands.

Never before presented at auction, En Canot was painted in the same extraordinary years that produced Renoir’s masterwork Bal du moulin de la Galette, today housed at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Both paintings celebrate, in similar style, the sun-dappled pleasures of Parisian life in a way that defines Renoir’s most celebrated works.The sitter is believed to be Marguerite “Margot” Legrand, one of Renoir’s favorite models from this time.

First explored in 1926 and developed throughout the 1950s, René Magritte's bowler-hatted man became one of the defining motifs of his career, functioning both as an anonymous everyman and a paradoxical self-portrait. L’Ami de l’order is among the most important examples of this signature series. The evocative composition marks the first painting in which the artist takes his bowler‑hatted man and turns him into a landscape silhouette. It comes to auction for the first time in decades from the Sydell Miller Collection—two years after Sotheby’s held A Legacy of Beauty: The Collection of Sydell Miller Evening Auction. 

In this painting, the familiar figure embodies Magritte's concept of the "hidden visible", revealing an alternate reality beneath the recognizable form. The crescent moon is only seen in one other variation of this series: L’Heureux donateur held at the Musée d’Ixelles in Brussels; the dusky half-light landscape of L’Ami de l’ordre recalls earlier landscape works such as Le Seize septembre.

A standout lot from Shaping Modernity: Property from a Private American Collection, Collioure. Les Balancelles (Opus 167) is a masterpiece from the height of Paul Signac’s Neo-Impressionist period. Painted in 1887 in the Mediterranean port of Collioure, the work is one of just four Opus paintings—a select group of Neo-Impressionist canvases that Signac regarded as his most successful achievements—executed at Collioure.

This canvas captures the dazzling light of the French Riviera through carefully orchestrated color, while its sail boats reflect the artist’s lifelong fascination with the sea. Painted as Signac was emerging as a leading spokesman for Neo-Impressionism, it demonstrates a move beyond the rigor of Pointillism towards the freer handling of paint that would later prove deeply influential to the Fauvist movement. Of the four Opus works from Collioure, two are now held in major museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kröller-Müller Museum.

Another masterwork from Shaping Modernity, André Derain’s Londres: La Tamise au pont de Westminster is one of the most striking paintings from the Frenchman's time in London. Its creation marks the moment he pushed Fauvism into its boldest and most experimental territory.

One of twenty‑nine views he made of the city, this painting is the most important to come to market, and captures the artist’s favorite vantage point on the Thames. In the frame, Westminster Bridge, Big Ben and the rising mass of Whitehall Court are transformed through radiant color. The work was commissioned directly by the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard who famously gave first-ever solo exhibitions to Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso.

Rounding out the highlights from Shaping Modernity is Maurice de Vlaminck’s La Route which was painted in the Seine valley near Chatou in the summer of 1906. La Route dates from the height of Vlaminck’s revolutionary Fauve period. The country road, wheatfield and telegraph poles are transformed through a brilliant, almost neon palette of pure, heightened color and rich, vigorous brushwork, reflecting the profound influence of Vincent van Gogh while expressing Vlaminck’s deep attachment to the landscape in which he had grown up. Among the artist’s earliest paintings to make the road a primary subject, the work anticipates a motif that Vlaminck would revisit throughout his career.

Held in the same private collection since it was acquired at auction in 1990, Naturaleza muerta con hucha y caballo negro dates from a pivotal moment in Frida Kahlo’s life and work. Painted when she was around 21—around the time she met and became engaged to Diego Rivera—it marks her transition from the precise, flattened modernism of her earliest paintings towards the lyrical, folkloric subjects and more dimensional, Old Master-influenced technique of her mature career.

Many scholars have interpreted the composition as an early wedding portrait, with the piggy bank standing in for Rivera and the delicately painted horse representing Kahlo. At the same time, the work reveals her growing fascination with Mexican artisanship, expressed through the intricate Tonalá ceramic plate and horse, and the delicate, natural dyes of the zarape textile backdrop. Drawing upon the traditions of Dutch and Spanish still-life painting, Kahlo reclaims the genre in a proudly Mexican context, celebrating the achievement of Mexican artisans while embedding the work with subtle personal meaning in the master tradition.

Edward Hopper's New England maritime scenes are among his most iconic subjects, and The Martha McKeen of Wellfleet is a masterpiece of the genre. Hopper completed only a handful of canvases each year, and most now hang in museum collections, so paintings of this scale and quality rarely reach the market. The present painting represents one of the most important works by the artist ever to come to auction. The Martha McKeen of Wellfleet captures a bright August morning on Cape Cod, a place central to Hopper's oeuvre. From his first visit in 1930 until his death in 1967, he returned to paint there nearly every summer.

Hopper's love of the sea began in childhood. He grew up in Nyack, New York, a shipbuilding town on the Hudson, and built his own sailboat as a teenager. That lifelong passion produced luminous, vividly colored paintings of lighthouses and boats, works that reveal a deep harmony between man and nature.

Marked “1ère Épreuve,” the present cast of Méditation taille originale, version type I dite aussi Petit modèle is one of two examples purchased from the Musée Rodin in 1924 by the renowned American entrepreneur Jules Mastbaum, a prolific collector of August Rodin and among the most influential champions of his legacy. The second cast resides in the Rodin Museum which Mastbaum founded in his hometown of Philadelphia. The present work remained in the Mastbaum family for almost seventy years before it was offered for public sale in 1995, where it was acquired by the family of the present owners.

Writing to Prince Eugen of Sweden in 1897 regarding a cast of Méditation destined for exhibition in Stockholm, Rodin declared: “In it the study of nature is complete, and I have made every effort to render art as complete as possible. I regard this plaster as one of my best finished, most accomplished works.” Throughout his career, Rodin returned to the composition several times, modifying the figure and casting variants both with and without arms. The contrapposto of Méditation, together with the extraordinary expressiveness of the hands, evokes Rodin’s Eve. Unlike Eve, however, whose bowed posture and concealed face convey remorse and inner torment, Méditation is expansive and outward-looking. The sinuous contours and flowing arabesques so reminiscent of Renaissance sculpture lend the figure sensuality and tenderness, uniting all the emotional intensity of Rodin’s best work with an unusual sense of grace.

Executed in Mougins on 8 December 1964, Nu assis sur un tapis rayé dates to Pablo Picasso’s inventive and exuberant late period. In the final decades of his life, liberated from the expectations of critics and increasingly unconcerned with the boundaries between tradition and experimentation, Picasso returned obsessively to the theme of the seated female nude. These mature works are at once deeply personal and profoundly art-historical, drawing upon a lifetime of looking while transforming familiar subjects through an energy and freedom uniquely his own.

This work is closely connected to Picasso’s enduring engagement with the odalisque. Since the 1950s, the artist had revisited the sumptuous interiors and reclining beauties that occupied such an important place in the work of Henri Matisse, a friend, rival, and artistic touchstone. Reflecting on Matisse’s death in 1954, Picasso famously remarked, “...when Matisse died, he left his odalisques to me as a legacy... After all, why shouldn’t someone inherit something from one’s friend?” More than a passing quip, the statement reveals Picasso’s understanding of artistic inheritance as an active, creative process. The patterned surface beneath the sitter, the decorative richness of the foreground and the emphasis on sensuality all evoke Matisse’s celebrated interior odalisque scenes, yet the treatment is unmistakably Picasso’s.

Norman Rockwell created 321 cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post over a 47-year period. This work, held in an important private collection for over three decades, was executed for the November 2nd, 1929 issue of The Saturday Evening Post and is the final time that James K. Van Brunt modeled for the artist. Van Brunt, known for his magnificent mustache, was one of Rockwell's favorite models and posed for ten of Rockwell's Post covers. Here, Rockwell depicts him as a violinist enticed to buy a saxophone, a defining symbol of the Jazz Age.

In drawing a classical musician tempted by the new instrument of the day, Rockwell sets up the narrative tension and humor which defined his great Post covers. The artist himself described the painting as being a representation of "the old confronted by the new and wondering what it's all about and whether he should take up the old ways or hold to the old."

An extraordinary convergence of two imaginative worlds, The Journeys of Prester John is a rare collaborative painting by Leonora Carrington and Edward James that brings together the visionary artistry of one of Surrealism’s most singular figures and the fantastical sensibilities of its great patron (critically, without whom we might not know Carrington’s work today).

Painted in oil on both sides of the canvas, the work unfolds across two intricate compositions populated by hybrid creatures and enigmatic landscapes. Its exquisite detail and luminous atmosphere lend conviction to an otherwise impossible world, while its Biblical and mythological references reflect Carrington and James’s shared fascination with storytelling across cultures and history. Exceptionally rare within Carrington’s oeuvre, the painting is also a remarkable testament to a friendship that found expression not only in collecting and patronage, but in the act of artistic co-creation.