From the 1960s to the 1980s, Andy Warhol’s Factory was as much a cultural incubator as it was a studio. A generation of artists, actors, models, and writers called The Factory home, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Gerard Malanga, and, of course, Andy Warhol.

In downtown Manhattan, Andy Warhol cultivated an artistic and social circle that shaped a generation.

Friends of The Factory

The first in a cycle of ten single-canvas portraits of his most iconic muse, Francis Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer Crouching reveals George Dyer as a conduit of the full range of human drama that defined their love affair.

Francis Bacon’s portrait of George Dyer inaugurates a vulnerable, hauntingly beautiful cycle of his most iconic muse.

Property from an Important Private Collector

Francis Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer Crouching

Spanning nearly half a century, four defining masterworks by Joan Mitchell from the same esteemed private collection chart the development of her career.

Property from an Esteemed Private Collection

Four Decades of Joan Mitchell

From San Francisco to Los Angeles, West Coast artists captured the splendors of California. Contemporaries to the Pop and Minimalism titans of the New York art scene, a rich artistic culture shaped and refracted by the state’s wealth of warmth, light, and space emerged, led by Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud.

West Coast artists captured the splendors of California, from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

California Dreaming

After the catalytic recalibration of what the picture plane could function as in the Postwar period, artists across movements reckoned with the time-honored medium. From Lucio Fontana’s Spatialism, Gerhard Richter’s post-photographic abstraction, to the architectural monumentality of Frank Stella’s shaped canvases, the canvas’ centuries-long stronghold on artmaking has been broadened, challenged, and even destabilized.

In the wake of Abstract Expressionism, artists across movements broadened, challenged, and even destabilized our understanding of painting’s limits.

Beyond the Picture Plane

Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler offer resplendently saturated, gestural approaches to landscape painting, while Yayoi Kusama and Roy Lichtenstein distill it into atomic particles of color.

Contemporary artists engage with and reimagine the centuries-long tradition of landscape painting.

Remembered Landscapes

New York

Head of Contemporary Art Marquee Sales

Lucius Elliott

SVP | Head of Contemporary Art, Co-Head of Marquee Sales, Americas

David Galperin

AVP, Specialist, Contemporary & The Now Evening Auctions

Cataloguer, Contemporary & The Now Evening Auctions

Serena Hildebrandt

Carolyn Kim

Cataloguer, Contemporary &amp; The Now Evening Auctions

Devon Mifflin

Pre-Sale Experience Coordinator, Contemporary Art

Abbey Flamm

Meet our Specialists

The New York Sales at Sotheby’s this May will present a series of auctions showcasing masterworks spanning over a century of artistic production. The sales feature the major artistic movements of the 19th, 20th and 21st century, from the innovations of the Impressionists to the groundbreaking works by young and emerging artists working today.

The Contemporary Evening Sale in May 2024 will feature artworks which capture the seismic shifts that occurred in art in the latter half of the 20th Century. Beginning with Post-War abstraction in America and Europe, through to Color-Field painting, Minimalism and the Pop Art movement, and into the critical postmodern inquiries of the 1980s and 1990s, this radical new mode of art-making fundamentally altered the course of art history, laying the foundations for the art movements which would shape the next fifty years across the globe. Spotlighting these developments within a unified platform, the masterworks of the Contemporary Art Evening Sale call into focus the plurality of visions, identities, and artistic innovations that reshaped the trajectory of art history as we know it today.

Contemporary Evening Auction