Sotheby’s New York’s May Marquee Week pivots from postwar to modern on Tuesday, May 19, 7:00 PM EDT, when the Modern Evening Auction will offer Pablo Picasso’s Arlequin (Buste) (1909) at a $40 million estimate, Vincent van Gogh’s La Moisson en Provence at $25–35 million, and a Henri Matisse La Séance du matin at $20–30 million. Aggregate low estimate sits at $244.8 million; high at $333.9 million. Public exhibition closes Monday, May 18.
The Headline Lot: Picasso’s 1909 Cubist Transition
Arlequin (Buste) was painted in the spring of 1909 — the same season Picasso began the trip to Horta de Ebro that produced the most decisive cubist landscapes of his career. The sitter, drawn in the analytic cubist register Picasso was actively inventing month by month at that point, sits in the bridge between the Rose Period harlequins and the full faceted-plane cubism of 1910–1911. Works from this specific window — 1908 through early 1910 — almost never come up at auction in private hands. The painting is consigned from the Surrealist artist Enrico Donati and his wife Adele’s private collection, where it has lived for decades.
The $40 million estimate places Arlequin (Buste) at the top of the Modern night and inside the pricing band that anchored Sotheby’s spring catalog. Two additional Donati lots will cross the block in the same sale: a 1925 Wassily Kandinsky abstraction titled Rote Tiefe (Red Depth) at $12–18 million, and a 1939 Yves Tanguy surrealist work, Aux Aguets le jour, at $800,000 to $1.2 million. Thirteen additional Donati works will be distributed across the broader May series.
The Van Gogh: The Only Arles Watercolor Left in Private Hands
La Moisson en Provence is a watercolor from Vincent van Gogh’s Arles period — the productive 1888 window in the south of France that produced the sunflowers, the yellow house, and the body of work that made him posthumously canonical. Sotheby’s catalog notes that this is the only work from Van Gogh’s Arles watercolor production still held privately. Every other example resides in an institutional collection. The estimate band of $25–35 million reflects both the rarity and the fact that the watercolor medium (versus oil) traditionally trades at a discount even for trophy material from this artist.
A clean result inside the estimate band would re-price the entire Arles-watercolor comparable set — a category that has had no public marker for years because, definitionally, the works never come to market. Lenders, museums, and Van Gogh foundations will be watching this lot specifically.
The Stack Behind the Headlines
Beyond Picasso, Van Gogh, and Matisse, the Modern Evening will also feature exceptional sculptures and paintings from the Durand-Ruel Family Collection, the Barbier-Mueller Collection, the David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection, the Collection of Sybil Shainwald, and the Latner Family Collection. Sotheby’s has loaded provenance into this catalog the way a luxury watch dealer loads documentation into a Patek: every signature lot carries a name with weight, and that grouping is itself a positioning statement for the night.
For context: the $244.8 million low estimate on Tuesday’s Modern night sits at roughly 57 percent of what the Sotheby’s Thursday May 14 night actually delivered ($433.1 million). That is the deliberate construction of an auction calendar — the Thursday night ran the postwar/contemporary heat, and the Tuesday night runs the deep-provenance modern material to the same room of buyers. Expect crossover bidders, expect bidding off the back of Thursday’s results, and expect the room’s appetite from the $85.8 million Rothko to spill into the $40 million Picasso.
The Marquee Week Calendar
- May 2–18 — Sotheby’s public exhibition open at 1334 York Avenue, reservation required during exhibition dates.
- May 14, 7:00 PM — The Now & Contemporary Evening + Robert Mnuchin “Collector at Heart” (already hammered: $433.1M combined).
- May 16, evening — Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale at Rockefeller Center.
- May 19, 7:00 PM — Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction (this preview’s subject).
- May 19, end of day — TEFAF New York closes at the Park Avenue Armory after a five-day run.
What to Watch on Tuesday
Three signals matter for collectors, lenders, and advisors tracking Tuesday night:
- Does the Picasso clear $40 million at the hammer? A hammer at or above the low estimate re-confirms the cubist-transition band as one of the few categories in modern that buyers will reach for at full price in 2026. A pass or a chandelier-bid clear is the read in the other direction.
- Does the Van Gogh watercolor hammer inside $25–35 million? A clean result anchors the entire Arles-watercolor comparable set for the first time in a generation.
- Does the Donati Kandinsky make estimate? The $12–18 million band on a 1925 abstraction is a meaningful test of the German modernist mid-tier, which has been soft since 2022.
The exhibition is open by reservation through Monday, May 18. The sale hammers Tuesday, May 19, at 7:00 PM Eastern at Sotheby’s New York. For collectors with Modern collateral on the books or material in storage they have been thinking about repositioning, this is the public comp event of the spring.
Sources
Sale details, estimate bands, and provenance summaries sourced from Sotheby’s catalog releases, HENI, ARTnews, Salon Privé, and The Art Newspaper coverage of the May 2026 Marquee Week.
