Christie’s specialists share the must-see lots coming to New York this November

‘Untitled (RIOT) is one of those paintings that just stops you in your tracks. It’s raw, graphic and totally uncompromising; four letters that feel like a punch and a whisper at the same time. When Christopher Wool started making these word paintings in the late ’80s, painting was supposedly over — photography, appropriation and conceptual art had taken over — but he found a way to make painting feel urgent again by pushing it to the edge of language itself.

‘RIOT isn’t just a word here; it’s an idea about rebellion, chaos, even miscommunication. You can read it as a protest, a joke or a warning, and all of those readings are true. The surface is beautiful too: that thick, inky blue, the drips, the imperfections. It’s both painterly and mechanical — totally Wool. It’s a work that captures the moment when painting had to fight for its own survival — and won.’

‘To tell the story of modernism’s midcentury, transatlantic journey, there is nothing privately held quite like the Weis collection. Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red and Blue is its lynchpin, begun in Europe and finished in New York. Its striking grid reflects the skyscraping architecture—exemplified by Rockefeller Center—that made New York Mondrian’s home for the balance of his life. As Michel Seuphor once said, “Mondrian followed the path of the sun and, if you will, of civilization.”'

‘Claude Monet’s water lilies series is widely considered to be the crowning achievement of his late career, spanning for over 25 years of study. Painted in 1907 and belonging to a small series of 15 striking examples in a vertical format, Nymphéas is not just a beautiful picture of the artist’s famed lily pond in his oasis at Giverny but a masterclass in composition, extraordinarily layered and complex.

‘The canvas offers an immersive experience that is meditative and sublime. The waterlilies hover on the surface and serve to anchor space, providing bursting punctuations of color, but it is the water itself, reflecting the sky from beneath, giving life to the flowers, running deep beneath, that provides both the mystery and beauty to this encounter. As viewer, we occupy Monet’s position as he articulates his present moment, an instant in 1907, unique to his eyes, which miraculously becomes enduring and everlasting, enshrined as art.’

‘This magnificent Mark Rothko from 1958 is one of the crown jewels of the Collection of Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis. During this moment in Rothko’s career, he reached a new level of critical acclaim, having recently been awarded the commission for the Seagram murals.

‘The colours of No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) — red, yellow and pink — sit in perfect harmony with one another. What struck me most about this painting the first time I saw it was the shimmery, pearlescent quality to the paint in the upper field. Rothko, famously enthralled by capturing the effect of light in paint, achieves an extraordinary luminescence and radiance in a way I have never seen before. The flourish in the upper left of the painting also fascinates me — a special compositional element that Rothko employed in select canvases, including superlative examples in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.’

‘Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is a masterpiece by David Hockney, which recently returned from the triumphant exhibition David Hockney 25 at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The very first of the artist’s celebrated double-portraits, it represents a pivotal moment in his career, combing the subtle exploration of his subjects’ personal relationship with his own groundbreaking use of space, sightlines and surface.

‘Hockney captures the brilliance of Californian light and the freedoms of the West Coast culture he fell in love with. It also celebrates fellow Englishman and émigré Christopher Isherwood, one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century, whose home with Don Bachardy provided the salon for a dynamic community of artists, writers and intellectuals including W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley and Truman Capote. As one of the only privately held double-portraits remaining, it offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire a defining masterpiece from one of the most significant chapters in modern art.’

‘It’s impossible not to be awestruck by Ed Ruscha’s How Do You Do?, his largest Mountain painting ever to come to auction, with a sweeping panoramic view measuring more than 10 feet across. The subtle cascade of blues and purples pulls you into the picturesque landscape, as if watching the horizon shift from dusk to dawn.

‘Inspired by the fantastical mountain ranges of movies and myth, Ruscha captures the “ideas of mountains” with his snowcapped peaks, staging nature as a theatrical backdrop on which language and meaning take centre stage. The simple phrase “How do you do?” becomes both a greeting and a provocation, echoing the mark of modern man on the natural world across the vast expanse of the canvas.’

‘This fall Christie’s will present Property from the Bill and Dorothy Fisher Collection, a best-in-class grouping, which underscores the significance of American patronage in the history of Impressionism, and will be sold to benefit philanthropic endeavours. Leading this group is Paul Signac’s L’Odet à Quimper, a radiant canvas rooted in one of the artist’s greatest passions.

‘An enthusiastic yachtsman, Signac was fascinated by the water, travelling extensively by boat to many of Europe’s greatest ports. The work depicts Quimper, the ancient medieval town on the river Odet in Britanny, bathed in brilliant, crystalline light. Painted in 1922-23, it is an exceptional example of the Pointillist’s mature painterly style.’

‘Coming from the Collection of Elaine Wynn, Ocean Park #40 is a truly unparalleled example of Richard Diebenkorn’s celebrated series named for the Santa Monica neighbourhood he moved to in 1966. This is undoubtedly the best Ocean Park painting to come to auction and rivals the best institutional examples. Standing in front of the painting, you can imagine yourself in Diebenkorn’s airy, sunlit studio. The luminous and atmospheric quality of the colours evokes the ocean and the crisp coastal air. The painting’s geometric structure offers a frame of reference, but it’s the scale that really draws you in. What I find so remarkable is how Ocean Park #40 manages to be both landscape and abstraction, holding those two ideas in perfect balance.’

‘Before Impressionism, before abstraction, J.M.W. Turner was already breaking the rules. Landscape transformed into poetry. Trees rendered into light. Cliffs transfigured into colour. A vision that was decades ahead of its time. Turner wasn’t painting what he saw. He was painting how he felt, the first step towards modern painting. This work depicts Ehrenbreitstein, its ruined Roman fortress and the pyramidal tomb of Marceau, all enduring symbols of the ravages of war. With flickering salmon pinks, hazy whites and strokes that mimic the texture of the cliff but verge on pure abstraction, Turner transforms the landscape into a meditation on war, peace and the passage of time.’

‘With his blockbuster exhibition currently on at the Royal Academy in London, Kerry James Marshall is the artist of the moment. In this painting, Marshall poignantly depicts an imagined portrait of John Punch, the first person sentenced to lifelong enslavement in the British colony of Virginia in 1646. As no known images of Punch exist, Marshall felt compelled to paint his imagined likeness through a contemporary lens, powerfully humanising his subject and underscoring the injustices he endured that continue into the present. The artist imbues his subject with a sizzling power and defiance.

‘This is a true masterwork by the artist and has been in the same prestigious private collection since its production. As described by Bruce Bailey, collector, friend, and early patron of Marshall’s work, this is “Kerry James Marshall’s Mona Lisa”.’

‘It’s hard to overstate the significance of Cowboy in Richard Prince’s career. This isn’t just another artwork — it’s his self-portrait. Realised not in paint or photograph, but in bronze. A life’s work distilled into a single figure. The culmination of Richard Prince’s decades-long dialogue with the icon that made him.

‘The sculpture’s origin story already feels almost mythical. On his 62nd birthday, Prince’s wife gifted him a mannequin of a young boy dressed as a cowboy. The artist was startled by it, drawn to it, spellbound. Over the next two years, he adjusted and refined it until the figure mirrored something profoundly personal. Here, the cowboy is no longer a Marlboro ad or a cinematic hero, but a mirror. He is America — and he is Richard Prince: stoic, mythic, perpetually caught between authenticity and artifice. In this sculpture, Prince turns the image that defined him into something eternal.’

‘Originally in the collection of scholar Douglas Cooper, the greatest collector of the Cubist style, this Fernand Léger, from 1914, is the centrepiece of the Arnold and Joan Saltzman Collection. Taking as his focus the revolutionary creative spirit that animated Europe in the early 20th century, Arnold Saltzman was ambitious and wide-ranging in his collecting. From striking figuration to daring abstraction, across paintings, drawings and sculpture, the collection he built traverses artistic movements and boundaries.

‘This Léger belongs to the artist’s Contrast of Forms series, which has always been the high water mark of Léger’s early output. Léger’s paintings pointed forwards to abstraction and took the Cubistic experiment further than Picasso or Braque.’