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Christie’s, the auction house owned by billionaire François Pinault’s Artémis Group, is looking to Donald Trump’s flagship tax and spending bill to help revive the stagnant art market after a period of geopolitical uncertainty weighed on sales.
The auction house reported flat first-half sales of $2.1bn on Tuesday as the art market continues to struggle. The result improved on the same period last year, when sales slid 22 per cent. The house said that luxury categories such as jewellery and wine had shown significant growth, up 29 per cent to $468mn.
Bonnie Brennan, Christie’s chief executive since February, said she hoped President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, which could benefit wealthier Americans and corporations, would “breed confidence to really let us get back to a focus on our business. When there’s volatility in the market, people get distracted, they retreat.”
London-headquartered Christie’s US clients in the first half of the year represented 45 per cent of buyers, up from 41 per cent in the same period last year. Clients from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa were down four percentage points to 34 per cent, and those from Asia flat at 21 per cent, the auction house said.
Christie’s achieved seven of the 10 highest prices at auction in the first half of the year, including the most expensive lot, a Piet Mondrian painting that fetched $47.6mn with fees. It sold a manuscript version of the US Declaration of Independence for $2.47mn.
A study by ArtTactic, a market research business, estimated that first-half sales at Christie’s major rival, Sotheby’s, fell 9 per cent to $1.65bn. Both houses consulted on redundancies last year.
The art market has been in a multiyear slump as political uncertainty in the US and slower economic growth in China have weighed on sales. Sotheby’s shut its ecommerce business in mainland China earlier this year.
Auction sales globally fell 20 per cent to $23.4bn in 2024, the lowest level since 2020, according to the Art Basel/UBS Art Market Report 2025, “with double-digit declines in the value and volume of sales in the $10mn-plus segment”.
Some of the world’s richest collectors are now choosing to bypass auction houses with private sales.
Christie’s has been owned by Artémis since 1998 and does not publish detailed results. The auction house announced late last year that its full-year sales for 2024 had fallen 6 per cent to $5.7bn.
