Sotheby’s Private Sales Are Becoming More Public

In mid-October, just as Art Basel Paris gets underway, Sotheby’s will commandeer a Parisian apartment overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries.

Nearly $150 million worth of art will hang on its walls, including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Francis Bacon. There will also be a restaurant, Italian food, French desserts and cocktails by Colin Field, the former head bartender at the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz Paris.

The show is titled Chez Sotheby’s, and it’s the next instalment of the house’s oxymoronic push to make private sales more public.

It follows the second iteration of The Apartment, an invitation-only selling exhibition I saw at Sotheby’s London in March. Around $40 million of art was installed in a stately boardroom alongside furniture by Rose Uniacke. David Rothschild, then co-head of Sotheby’s UK contemporary private sales, showed me paintings by David Hockney, George Condo, Gerhard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among other heavyweights. Around half of the works sold.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (908-8), 2009. Courtesy Sotheby's

Rothschild – who has since become global lead of private sales exhibitions – is now scaling the concept in Paris, with a space four times the size of the London apartment and an inventory worth nearly four times as much. Not long ago, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips were reluctant to discuss behind-closed-doors business. But its surge over the last few years has meant they are now more willing to talk shop.

“The space in Paris is quadruple the size of The Apartment you saw in London, hence quadruple the value,” Rothschild tells The Art Journal. “The positive feedback we received after presenting The Apartment twice in London gave us the confidence to do this much more ambitious project in Paris.”

Rothschild is keen to stress that this is not an attempt to siphon off business from Sotheby’s auctions. “We are not intentionally moving business away from auction,” Rothschild says. Instead, the house is trying to offer sellers and buyers “a different product, a bespoke way or unique opportunity to sell or to buy.”

Each of the “Big Three” auction houses has leaned further into private sales, largely due to the auction market’s dip over the last few years. Sotheby’s private sales rose from around $1 billion in 2019 to $1.2 billion in 2025, while Christie’s private sales increased from $800 million to $1.5 billion over the same period. Over at Phillips, its 2025 private business jumped 66% year on year.

Rothschild has previously told me that, in periods of uncertainty, sellers increasingly value the ability to avoid conservative public estimates and the binary nature of an auction result. “Pricing security is the primary motivator,” he said at the time.

With Chez Sotheby’s, however, Rothschild says the pitch is less about price and more about the “experience.” The show was conceived in partnership with _POLIMENO, a creative consultancy and studio working across art, design, culture and hospitality launched by Valerio Polimeno. 

It’s true that both Christie’s and Sotheby’s are dipping their toes deeper into the experience economy. But, at the end of the day, money is always their main motivator. “Global consumers across all luxury markets desire experiences,” Rothschild says. “Chez Sotheby’s is precisely that.”

Wayne Thiebaud, Sucker Tree, 1962. Courtesy Sotheby's

In Paris, visitors will be able to have lunch or cocktails while looking at works by some of the most expensive artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. I ask Rothschild how he assesses whether such hospitality will translate into stronger commercial results, as opposed to simply presenting the same works in Sotheby’s galleries. “We are conscious of creating an elevated platform for our customers and we will measure the success of this venture based on the feedback we receive from clients,” he replies.

It’s a strategy increasingly adopted across the wider luxury market, where brands are selling experiences alongside the products themselves. Sotheby’s is now applying that logic to art worth tens of millions of dollars.

The idea also has a distinctly Parisian precedent. According to Sotheby’s, Chez Sotheby’s draws on the homes, restaurants and hotels associated with figures such as Marie-Laure de Noailles, Jacqueline de Ribes and Charles de Beistegui, as well as institutions including Le Palace and Le Mathis, where artists, collectors and other cultural figures gathered.

Christie’s has also recently hosted major invitation-only selling exhibitions, including Ghost Pavilion: A Venice Revealed at the Palazzo Ca’ Dario. It coincided with the opening of this year’s Venice Biennale and featured works by J. M. W. Turner, Édouard Manet and Titian alongside contemporary works by Warhol, Louise Bourgeois and Mark Bradford.

In Venice, Christie’s global head of private sales, Adrian Meyer, echoed Rothschild, telling me that private sales were benefiting from market uncertainty because sellers appreciated the reassurance of knowing what they would get.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1965-66. Courtesy Sotheby's

The lines between auctions and private sales are becoming blurrier, but there is still one obvious difference: the price. The auction room offers public price discovery. Private sales do not. As more major works are sold privately, it becomes harder for outsiders to know exactly what some of the most valuable paintings in the market are changing hands for.

Rothschild, however, doesn’t think the growth of private sales will make the market significantly less transparent. “Within the auction houses, the volume at auction each year is significantly larger than the volume of private sales, at virtually every price point,” he says. “I don’t worry that the growth of private sales will make buying art more difficult or less transparent.”

He says collectors want the option of choosing between the two: “Some collectors want to buy and sell privately, some collectors prefer auction. The majority like having the option to do both.”

This flexibility is becoming particularly relevant as a huge amount of art comes back onto the market through generational wealth transfer. Sotheby’s has recently handled major single-owner collections belonging to Leonard A. Lauder, Robert Mnuchin, Emily Fisher Landau, Pauline Karpidas, the Lewis Collection and Sydell Miller. This autumn, it’s gearing up to sell more works from the personal collection of the American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and his wife Dorothy in New York, as well as 44 works on paper from the collection of the German industrialist Count Duerckheim in London.

“Exceptional provenance continues to drive demand,” Rothschild says. “These landmark collections consistently achieve some of the most significant results in the market.”

That’s also why he doesn’t see private-sales exhibitions replacing auctions any time soon. “I maintain that auctions will remain Sotheby’s primary business. But, simultaneously it is our goal to continue to grow the private business and create bespoke experiences to show art, like The Apartment and Chez Sotheby’s,” he adds.

Inside the house, he stresses, auction and private sales are “not competing products.” True or not, private sales are becoming decidedly more visible.