Inside Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art Day Sales: specialists share their picks

‘Untitled serves as a bridge between Joan Mitchell’s Black paintings of the early 1960s and her later, more colour-filled works. It’s a deeply emotional painting that holds a real psychological charge, with each stroke feeling poised and contemplative. Filled with earthy greens and punctuated by deep violet and fiery reds, it calls to mind the French landscapes that informed her work. In the upper register, there is a beautiful atmospheric passage, almost reminiscent of a Turner sunset or sunrise. Using her fingers, rags and brush, Mitchell achieved an unparalleled intimacy with her materials, expanding the possibilities of paint as a medium. It is incredibly rare to find fresh-to-market Mitchells in this medium-scale format — the painting feels very large, yet still houseable. Untitled has remained in the same private collection for over a decade.’

‘Donald Judd’s Menziken boxes have an authority that is immediately felt. There is no hedging in these works; every decision is settled and unimpeachable. They carry a sense of inevitability. This particular colour formation — hot red against cool aluminium — is my favourite. The contrast reinforces the tensions inherent to the work. It is all about restraint and reveal. Minimalism is often seen as staid and cold, but this work changes depending on your vantage point, the light and the time of day. It withholds and then gives. The red hue maximises that effect. Frankly, it’s sexy. And dynamic. I love the honesty of the material. It’s not pretending to be anything. It is exactly what it is: fabricated, precise, unsentimentally beautiful. Walking around it is an experience. Living with it would be a dream.’

‘I really admire Édouard Vuillard’s distinctive ability to take a simple, intimate moment and turn it into something emotionally and psychologically complex. Set within his Paris apartment, Vuillard depicts his mother tending to her infant granddaughter, yet the composition resists straightforward narration. Through compressed space, flattened forms and a dense orchestration of pattern, he dissolves distinctions between figure and ground, embedding his subjects within their environment. This visual instability generates a charged atmosphere: the room becomes a metaphor for interior life, where intimacy coexists with tension and watchfulness.’

‘Soft Alphabet feels so emblematic of the partnership between Marian Goodman and Multiples, Inc. It speaks to Goodman’s connection with artists, and the way Multiples functioned as an incubator for ideas — a space where more unorthodox, concept-driven works could be brought into reality. Soft Alphabet began as a collaboration between Claes Oldenburg and  Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel: Oldenburg was so inspired by Crouwel’s padded-letter design for his 1970 catalogue cover that he asked him to draw the entire alphabet. What followed was this tactile, playful object, which feels core to Multiples’ mission because it invites us to rethink what a multiple can be — not just something flat, but something three-dimensional, experiential, and connected to an artist’s broader practice. It also gives a vivid sense of how Marian Goodman lived with art. These were the kinds of objects in her apartment, where her personality really comes through and where different mediums and price points could coexist in a way that feels personal and non-hierarchical.’

‘Andy Warhol’s Little Electric Chair stands out as my favourite work in the auction. It represents the dark side of Pop Art — “death in America”, as Warhol called it. Painted during his most productive and important period, it is an arresting and intensely powerful composition. The electric green background, the emptiness of the chair and the moodiness of the silkscreen combine to form a tragic, complex image. I look at the empty chair almost like the empty cross in a Renaissance painting of Christ’s deposition. These Little Electric Chairs have been prized by top collectors for decades. This example shows us why.’

‘The emotional power of the work really resonates with me. Dominating the composition, the fiercely expressive head — part skull, part self-image — stares fixedly out of the picture plane and stands among the boldest symbols in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s iconographic repertoire. What is so compelling about Basquiat’s works on paper is how directly they bring you into his process; there is an immediacy, almost like you are standing beside him as the ideas are forming. Dated 1982, this work was executed at a defining moment in Basquiat’s career, when the support of Annina Nosei proved instrumental in accelerating his remarkable artistic ascent. Increasingly, these works are recognised not as secondary, but as central to his practice — a point underscored by the institutional attention they are receiving today, including Basquiat - Headstrong, currently on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

‘I adore Pablo Picasso when he lets the air out of his own myth — and La Visite does exactly that. Here, the “visitor” is a monkey: curious and faintly ridiculous. I can’t help reading him as Picasso himself, caught in the act of looking, not as a master but as something more instinctive and slightly absurd. Opposite him, the seated nude is monumental and unbothered. He returns to this idea elsewhere, perhaps most clearly in the sculpture La guenon et son petit (1951), where a simian figure is assembled from found objects, half joke, half revelation. What I love is how little it takes in this work: a few lines, a wash, and suddenly the whole grand drama of artist and model feels disarmingly human.’