Celebrating a Century of Modern Art at Sotheby's New York

The century that followed was one of powerful artistic reinvention. Twentieth century avant-garde movements built on that early rupture and extended it in bold new directions, breaking down form, challenging perspective, and surrendering painting to the forces of dreams and pure feeling.

With summer just around the corner, Sotheby's New York invites collectors and modern art enthusiasts to discover a collection of rare scope and ambition.Featuring over a century of paintings, drawings, and sculptures from across Europe and the Americas, the auction traces a path from the Impressionist breakthrough through to the radical avant-garde movements of the twentieth century.

Read on to discover this auction’s highlights before placing your bid.

When and Where?

The collection will be on view at Sotheby's New York from Saturday 2nd May through Monday 18th May, with doors open daily from 10 AM to 5 PM. The live auction takes place on Wednesday 20th May, split across two sessions: the first covering lots 301 to 440, and the second covering lots 501 to 610.

Standout Lots

1. Pablo Picasso’s Buste d'homme barbu (Bearded Man Bust) | Estimate: $2,000,000 – $3,000,000

Picasso married Jacqueline Roque in 1961 and settled with her at Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie, a secluded villa in the hills above Cannes. Shielded from the pressures of his public life, he embarked on one of the most productive stretches of his later career, a period now widely referred to by scholars as his "Heroic Years." It was here that he completed Buste d'homme barbu, or Bearded Man Bust, in March 1965, aged eighty-three.

This work is part of a series of male portraits that held Picasso's attention throughout his final decade. Bearded and authoritative, these figures drew inspiration from the archetypes of musketeers and Golden Age noblemen, though the paintings carry a deeply personal undercurrent. Picasso reportedly said that every man he depicted reminded him of his own father, and the series is generally understood as an exploration of identity, ageing, and artistic legacy. In Buste d'homme barbu, the face is rendered through rapid, confident brushwork set against broad areas of white, reducing the figure to its most essential expressive qualities. The outcome is a striking image, one anchored by the mirada fuerte (translates to strong gaze), a motif that recurs across his late portraits and is often read as a form of self-projection.

The piece has passed through seven different hands over the years. It last appeared at auction in 2005, when it sold at Christie's for $1.05 million. Its most recent acquisition came in 2018 through Helly Nahmad Gallery, London, and it now carries a pre-sale estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000, a figure whose lower bound sits 185% above its previous estimate of $700,000.

2. Wassily Kandinsky’s Poids monté | Estimate: $1,500,000 - $2,000,000

In 1933, the Bauhaus, a pioneering German school of art, architecture, and design, was forced to shut its doors under mounting fascist pressure. Wassily Kandinsky and his wife Nina subsequently left Germany and settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a quiet suburb of Paris, where he would live and work until his death in 1944. The relocation represented a significant shift in his artistic direction. The strict geometry and architectural precision that had shaped his Bauhaus period began to give way to a more organic visual language, one informed by a growing interest in biology, cosmology, and the microscopic structures of living organisms. Growth, gestation, and transformation became recurring themes, and the processes underlying the formation of living matter began to emerge throughout his work.

The focal point of Poids monté is a clean geometric circle extending into an irregular, organic tail, the resulting form calling to mind something microbiological or embryonic, as if observed beneath a microscope. Behind it, a trapezoidal plane cuts through the composition at an angle, drawing the eye upward, a movement echoed by the pink and lilac ellipses on the right. The blacks and whites that frame the central elements simultaneously flatten and add depth to the canvas, generating a persistent sense of motion across its surface.

The painting has been held by its current owner since the 1990s, when it was acquired from a private collection in Japan. It carries a pre-sale estimate of $1,500,000 to $2,000,000.

3. René Magritte’s Le Compotier | $800,000 - $1,200,000

By 1958, René Magritte, one of Belgium's most celebrated Surrealist painters, was enjoying one of the most productive periods of his career. The driving force was a contract signed two years earlier with dealer Alexandre Iolas, which secured him an annual retainer in return for first refusal on new works and exclusive rights across the United States. The arrangement proved to be a turning point: that year alone Magritte completed twenty-seven oil paintings and more than a dozen gouaches, among them Le Compotier.

The painting was part of an ongoing investigation Magritte had been conducting since the 1940s, one in which everyday objects were removed from their familiar context and repositioned in ways that made them feel strange and disorienting. Fruit became an increasingly common presence in his work during this time, appearing at times as an imposing, oversized mass and at others as something light and unmoored. The apple in particular became a recurring motif across many of his compositions. In Le Compotier, Magritte swaps it for a pear, while keeping the same smooth, bright green finish, a deliberate act of substitution that reflects his fascination with transformation and his ability to locate the uncanny in the most ordinary of subjects. The image was likely sourced from a botanical or fruit catalogue rather than direct observation, with several such publications found among his possessions following his death.

Rendered with a meticulous, almost clinical precision that reflects his earlier career as a commercial graphic artist, the pear's presence in the bowl feels out of place, which was his intention. As Magritte noted in his collected writings, everyday objects fascinated him not in spite of their familiarity but because of it. To him, they were vessels for a strangeness that ordinary perception tends to pass over.

Known for his discerning eye, Iolas chose to keep the companion oil painting for his own collection. The gouache, meanwhile, sold to Bodley Gallery just two months after it was finished, pointing to the possibility that a buyer had already been lined up before the work left Magritte's studio.

4. Edward Hopper’s Monhegan Lighthouse | $1,200,000 - $1,800,000

New England was not simply a backdrop in Edward Hopper's art. It was its foundation. From his early summers spent in Maine to a lifelong connection with Cape Cod, the region supplied him with the subjects he would spend a career turning into icons of American painting. Among these, the lighthouse proved to be one of the most enduring motifs, surfacing in his work across several decades.

Situated ten miles off the Maine coast, Monhegan Island had long attracted American painters to its dramatic shoreline and expansive Atlantic light. Hopper paid his first visit in the summer of 1916, returning each year until 1919 and producing thirty-two documented oils during that time. The majority depict waves meeting rocky bluffs, but Monhegan Lighthouse is one of just two works from the series to focus on the island's man-made structures rather than its landscape. The lighthouse occupies the centre of the composition, painted with pronounced shadow, precise architectural detail, and a strong feeling of texture in the foreground. It is widely regarded as one of the finest works from his formative years as a painter.

The impact of the Monhegan pictures reached well beyond Hopper's own practice. His ability to hold realism and something close to abstraction in tension left a traceable influence on the generations of American painters that followed.

Monhegan Lighthouse entered a private New York collection by 1974 and has since passed by descent to its current owner. It appears at public auction for the first time with a pre-sale estimate of $1,200,000 to $1,800,000.

Final Thoughts

What unites these works is not style or sensibility but the sheer ambition of the period that produced them. Different continents, different philosophies, different breaks from convention, and yet all of them are bound by the same restless century of art. Sotheby's, with its own history stretching back to 1744, is perhaps the most fitting stage for works that together tell the story of a century.