Blue-Chip Art Is in a Slump. It’s a Buyer’s Market for Monet, Picasso, and Warhol.

It’s a buyer’s market for blue-chip art right now. Here: Sotheby’s art handlers hold Claude Monet’s “Meules à Giverny.” (Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images)

Key Points

About This Summary

• A new report from Morgen & Stern indicates collectors have leverage to buy top-quality art at great prices.
• The report found that 55% of wealthy collectors plan to sell, while only 43% plan to buy artwork.
• Private art sales are rising, with collectors demanding fair value, impeccable provenance, and extensive research.

Art sales may be in a prolonged slump, but a Berlin-based art broker focused on blue-chip works says collectors have “exceptional leverage” to buy top-quality art at great prices.

Current conditions in the art world have created the “strongest buyer’s market in more than a decade,” especially in private sales, according to Morgen & Stern.

The broker bases its conclusion on its decades of experience and data from private sales of top-quality art, but also from research the firm published on Wednesday distilling findings from several sources, including art market and auction reports, and wealth management analysis.

“Know Your Art: The Morgen & Stern Global Blue-Chip Art Market Report 2025” concludes that collectors have a 10% to 25% negotiating window for buying blue-chip works, with that percentage rising to 50% in distress sales.

By blue-chip art, the firm means works by established, academically studied artists whose works populate museums and routinely sell for more than $1 million at auction. The names are familiar and cross time periods, from Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, and David Hockney, to Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, and Francis Bacon.

Although a persistent slump in the art world since 2023 has created a buying opportunity for acquisitive collectors for months if not years, the report indicates the dynamics in the market have recently changed, says Felix Holzapfel, a Morgen & Stern managing partner.

“The buyers are more confident,” Holzapfel says. “They know that they are in the driver’s seat.”

Morgen & Stern, which grew out of a second-generation family office, works with more than 1,000 ultrawealthy individuals, including more than 600 billionaires throughout the world.

The purpose of the report, which used artificial intelligence to comb through data available in such sources as the annual global market report from Art Basel and UBS, the Artnet Price Database, auction reports from the major houses, and the Art and Finance Report, was to provide its collectors with a succinct, unbiased snapshot of the blue-chip sector.

One fact they surfaced is that 55% of wealthy collectors plan to sell, while only 43% plan to buy, creating the kind of supply-demand imbalance that benefits buyers. But the report found that buyers aren’t willing to just snap up anything, even at the right price. They want to understand the provenance, condition, and market history of each work and they are willing to negotiate no matter how long it takes.

Collectors who saw initial drafts of the report’s conclusions said the data insights gave them more confidence to make lower offers than sellers may have expected, according to Tillmann Woeske, a managing partner whose father started the company.

Collectors make offers for works all the time, “but there’s this behavior of not making offers that are too low—they are afraid that their image will get damaged,” Woeske says. But now they can see in black-and-white that there’s a huge gap between the asking and market prices. “This has encouraged our collectors,” he says.

Among findings was the rise of private sales—one-on-one transactions made through auction houses, top-tier dealers, and firms such as Morgen & Stern. As the report found, auction sales of works priced at $10 million or more sank 45% last year after falling 40% a year earlier, according to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report released in April. The Artnet Price Database recorded a total 8.8% slump in sales in the first half of this year. That follows a slide of 25% in 2024, according to the Art Basel-UBS report.

But private sales last year rose 41% at Christie’s to $1.5 billion and 17% at Sotheby’s, to $1.4 billion. Though the absolute dollar figures pale in comparison to lost auction revenue, the figures speak to a trend taking place throughout the art world where more deals are being struck in opaque private-sale transactions.

One reason may be that 74% of collectors today tend to research extensively before buying an artwork, demanding “fair value and impeccable provenance,” and focusing on the very best blue-chip works, a process that takes time that is not always available in a public auction. In fact, the report found, negotiations are taking longer today, and “buyers are more willing to walk away.”

Also, collectors want to limit the risk of an artwork being “burned,” in the market, which occurs when a work is offered publicly and fails to sell.

It’s possible the fortunes of the art market are changing. Morgen & Stern have received nearly as many works from collectors looking to sell in the last four weeks than they received all of the previous year. It’s unclear why that is the case—it could just be a group of collectors who need to sell right now, Holzapfel says, “or is the market already shifting?”

That is possible, because collectors recognize the pick up in private sales. And, as he and Woeske say, the fortunes of the art market tend to lag behind those of financial markets, which have been strong.
“It’s been a buyer’s market for a long time, Woeske says. “But we see indicators that it’s coming back to life.”

Write to Abby Schultz at abby.schultz@barrons.com