Market report

What we’re hearing from galleries and auction houses across the country

John Moran Auctioneers gallery view.

Katherine Halligan
Director, Fine Art
John Moran Auctioneers
Our year-to-date has been gratifyingly strong, despite market and government uncertainties. We’ve now conducted all of our sale categories for the first half of 2025 and saw strong results for our blue-chip California plein air audience as well as Western, modern and contemporary art. Our most recent sale was Latin American Art + Design. We are proud to be one of the few regional houses offering this sale category and saw incredible interest, particularly from bidders in Latin American, with really strong results across the art and design categories.

As is usually the case, fresh-to-market works, often estate pieces or museum deaccessions, tend to be of strong interest to our collecting audience. In recent months, we offered works by some important contemporary African American artists and achieved the world record for artist and historian Samella Lewis’ work as well as a strong result for a museum-owned Richard Mayhew landscape.

While we are a regional house, our buyers are international. Our marketing plans mirror the type of property on offer, so the recent Latin American sale was heavily marketed south of the border, which led to huge engagement particularly with South America, and our contemporary leaning recent sales had strong engagement across the country, particularly from the New York area. California, both north and south, continues to have our largest group of buyers.

Latin American surrealism [has been selling well]. From our recent Latin sale, we had a fantastic selection of works by Leonora Carrington, a fascinating European-born surrealist working in Mexico whose hallucinatory visions offer layers of meaning and intrigue. We offered four prints that all tripled and quadrupled our conservative presale estimates, but an original sketch for Mundo Mágico de los Mayas from 1963/1965 was the most exciting Carrington offered. The sketch was estimated conservatively at just $600 to $800 and brought an astounding $88,900, which is the world auction record for a work on paper by the artist.

In addition, historic Western art and contemporary Native American fine art from our spring auction of Art of the American West had a great selection of historic works from local estates and collectors, including a very strong work on paper by Charles Marion Russell that sold well above the $120,000 to $180,000 estimate for $285,750 and two fresh Maynard Dixons that both sold above estimates.

I think Western collectors and collectors of women modernists should look more closely at the work of Edith Hamlin, particularly her early pieces. Hamlin and her paintings have largely been sidelined by her more famous artist-husband Maynard Dixon and his work. I’d love to find more pre-Dixon early examples of Hamlin’s work to help further establish her as an innovative and creative early Western modernist.

John Moran Auctioneers
145 E. Walnut Avenue, Monrovia, CA 91016
(626) 793-1833 www.johnmoran.com