A $35m Picasso led first day sales, while galleries reported strong seven figure results across both historic and contemporary material
This year’s Art Basel opened with a series of strong, seven figure sales during the VIP preview yesterday, suggesting continued demand for top-tier works despite any lingering uncertainty in the broader art market. For Art Basel’s director Vincenzo de Bellis, the opening-day figures reflected an increased trust in the market among both exhibitors and collectors. “If you look at the quality that the galleries brought, it’s a super sign of confidence from their side, which makes me very confident about where the market is,” he says.
The most valuable transaction reported on the fair’s opening day, at the time of going to press, was Pablo Picasso’s Le peintre et son modèle dans un paysage (the painter and his model in a landscape, 1963), which was publicly offered at $35m by Hauser & Wirth. The fleshy painting is a self-portrait of Picasso and his second wife Jacqueline Roque, depicted as a Cubist nude.
“Basel is Basel. Clients come for art and to acquire something for their collection. It’s really no comparison to any other fair in the world,” says Marc Payot, the president of Hauser & Wirth. “We are in a very particular market right now; for important pieces, there is a lot of appetite, and for successful primary artists as well.”
Alongside Picasso, the gallery reported selling two works by Cy Twombly for $5m and $2.5m, a Louise Bourgeois work for $2.5m and a 1971
painting by Maria Lassnig for $1.75m. It also placed Nairy Baghramian’s multimedia sculpture Side Leaps_Spatial Compositions with a Swiss collection for €600,000. Baghramian is the artist chosen by Art Basel for this year’s Messeplatz commission.
Contemporary successes
Thaddaeus Ropac reported some of the day’s strongest sales. Pierre Soulages’s Peinture 146 x 97 cm, 31 janvier 1954 (1954) sold for more than $3m, while Helen Frankenthaler’s Sudden Wave (1982) sold for around $3m. (The Kunstmuseum Basel is currently staging the largest ever European survey of Frankenthaler’s work.) The gallery also sold Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese (1965) for €1.8m and Georg Baselitz’s Ach, Mädchen grün (2010) for €1.2m.
White Cube’s sales were led by Lynne Drexler’s Untitled (1960), which sold for $2.5m, and Doris Salcedo’s Untitled (2008), which was placed for $1.35m. Almine Rech also sold a Picasso painting, Satyre, Pan et nymphe (1938), for between $6m and $6.5m. It was part of Art Basel’s new Exclusive programme, in which galleries surprise attendees with work not included in the lists sent out ahead of the fair. It is a scheme meant to incentivise attending the fair in-person, de Bellis says.
Sales reported by David Zwirner included its Unlimited sector installation by Isa Genzken, which sold for €1.2m to a European museum. The gallery also placed two new paintings by Victor Man, including one that sold for €1m. Additional placements included a painting by Joan Mitchell, a painting by Yayoi Kusama, two paintings and a print by Gerhard Richter, and a work on paper by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Pace reported steady transactions across its stand, led by Lynda Benglis’s Power Tower (2019) going for $1.4m, followed by Robert Longo’s Untitled (Gerhard’s Forest) (2026) at $750,000 and Kenneth Noland’s Half & Half (1967) at $500,000. Other sales included Loie Hollowell’s Blue Brain on mauve rose shoulders (2026) for $450,000, Nigel Cooke’s Nemesis (2026) for $385,000, and Elmgreen & Dragset’s Speed (2026) for €260,000.
At Xavier Hufkens, a Louise Bourgeois sculpture sold for more than $2.2m. Gray says it placed two works by David Hockney, selling the late artist’s large-scale painting Studio Interior #2 (2014) for $8.5m. The gallery also reported selling Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven)—31 May, No. 1 (2011), one of the artist’s iPad drawings chronicling the changing Yorkshire landscape, for $650,000.
Meanwhile, Karma reported selling Jonas Wood’s Bonsai #13 (2026) for just under $1m, as well as works by Kathleen Ryan, Maja Ruznic and Woody De Othello. In the Unlimited sector, the gallery sold Ulala Imai’s large scale panoramic triptych STUDIO (2026) to an institutional collection for $275,000.