Published: 13 March 2026
Sotheby’s remains one of the most influential forces in the global art market, consistently presenting high-value works by blue-chip artists from different periods and various private collections. As the art landscape shifts across different mediums year by year, there is always a growing interest in artprints and graphic works, which now regularly feature in marquee sales, reflecting their demand and significant value.
Across previous sales, works by Banksy, Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein exceeded expectations, reaffirming a developing pattern in recent auction cycles. The highest bidding often appears to be concentrated in the mid to upper tiers of the print market, particularly on works that bridge modern art history and contemporary collecting categories. This is where iconic imagery, strong provenance and competitive price points continue to drive demand among both Gen Z art collectors and newer buyers.
An Auction that Defines the Season
Often underestimated by the media, prints are becoming increasingly important in the art world, allowing for the reproduction of stunning works while maintaining artistic integrity.
Sotheby’s London spring auction calendar is blooming with events and the Prints & Multiples sale is open for bidders until 25 March. The event is expected to attract competitive bidding throughout every lot, making it an elite and charming affair for this occasion. From striking graphics by contemporary printmakers such as Andy Warhol to celebrated pieces by international artists, including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the range of works on offer illuminates a graphic timeline of creativity and progress in the Post-Impressionism and Pop movements.
While the sale is led by names such as Picasso and Warhol, other masterworks by Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney and Gerhard Richter also resonate strongly with newer audiences.
Sotheby’s and the Rise of Million-Dollar Prints
Many assume that prints are simply digital reproductions or posters, but that is far from the truth. While some prints are indeed affordable editions of existing artworks, the majority are original creations, made specifically for the print medium and never produced in any other form. Conceived by a master printer working closely with the artist, each print is the result of a process often labour-intensive, demanding precision and a superior level of technical skill to achieve the final image.
Since 2023, the market for these artworks has intensified, with individual prints crossing price thresholds typically associated with unique paintings or sculptures.
Pablo Picasso: The Weeping Woman, I (La Femme qui Pleure. I )
Pablo Picasso's La Femme qui Pleure, I (1937) is a striking etching, aquatint, and drypoint print that sold for approximately $4.6 million in 2014 at Sotheby’s London. While Picasso painted a famous oil-on-canvas version of the Weeping Woman, this specific record is a rare impression
considered one of the most desirable versions of this subject.
The Weeping Woman I depicts one of the central figures from Picasso’s celebrated mural-scale painting Guernica, completed earlier in the same year. Like the painting, the print was created in response to the bombing of the defenceless town of Guernica on 26 April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The image is a powerful symbol of the artist’s homeland, torn apart by the conflict, and more broadly, a haunting reflection on the suffering and devastation brought upon by war.
Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave
Few artworks are as instantly recognisable as Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave. The piece translated into history when an early print sold for $2.8 million at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, November 2025, setting a new record for a single impression of this unique work. The final price was reached after an eight-minute bidding war and involved more than 20 bids.
The woodblock print dates back to 1831 and belongs to Hokusai’s celebrated series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Although thousands were originally produced, only a limited number of early impressions survive today, highly sought-after for their crisp detail and rich blue pigments, and this particular example was a standout for its remarkable state of preservation. Collectors favour early prints because each subsequent re-carving of the woodblocks gradually softened later impressions, leaving the earliest editions visually sharper and more appealing.
Auction Highlight: Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol
In the world of contemporary art prints and pop culture, few names resonate as powerfully as that of Andy Warhol. His work often depicts bold, bright, and repetitive images, perfectly capturing the postwar American consumerist movement and blurring the lines between art and mass production. His most famous prints remain the Marilyn Monroe series created in 1967.
The Marilyn (Feldman & Schellmann II.31) lot represents the highlight of the Prints & Multiples Auction coming to Sotheby’s London this March. The portrait is a screenprint in colours on wove paper, utilising Warhol’s signature silkscreen technique to achieve a specific palette of vibrancy and repetition in warm coral, pink and yellow tones. It stands as a remarkable exploration of fame and beauty at the intersection of pop culture with fine art, reinforcing Monroe’s image as both a sex symbol and a tragic muse.
Warhol once explained his fascination with Monroe by saying, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films…There’s nothing behind it.” Decades later, his words still reflect on the fleeting nature of fame within modern celebrity culture.
While the two never met, the merging of Marilyn and Warhol's art was not just a meeting of icons but rather a fusion that captured the era’s insatiable appetite for celebrity, the thin line between adoration, exploitation and the human fascination with tragedy, which both Warhol and Monroe were not immune to.
Prices for these screenprints vary according to condition and the rarity of the colourway, with previous Sotheby’s auction results ranging from $200,000 to more than $511,000.
As Sotheby’s brings this and other remarkable prints to auction in London, collectors are offered a moment to engage with works that shaped print culture and remain among the most recognisable images in modern art.
