Blue-Chip Sales Surge on Art Basel's Opening Day

A Confident Start to Art Basel 2026

This year's Art Basel opened with a wave of seven-figure transactions during the VIP preview, pointing to sustained appetite for top-tier works even as the wider art market navigates uncertain conditions. For the fair's director Vincenzo de Bellis, the opening-day figures reflected a deepening trust 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 said.

Picasso Leads the Charge

The most significant transaction reported on the fair's opening day was Pablo Picasso's Le peintre et son modèle dans un paysage (1963), publicly offered at $35m by Hauser & Wirth. The fleshy canvas depicts the artist alongside his second wife Jacqueline Roque, rendered 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," said Marc Payot, 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 the Picasso, Hauser & Wirth sold two Cy Twombly works for $5m and $2.5m respectively, a Louise Bourgeois piece for $2.5m, and a 1971 painting by Maria Lassnig for $1.75m. The gallery also placed Nairy Baghramian's multimedia sculpture Side Leaps_Spatial Compositions with a Swiss collection for €600,000. Baghramian is the artist selected for this year's Messeplatz commission.

Strong Performances Across the Fair

Thaddaeus Ropac reported some of the day's most notable 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) fetched around $3m — a timely result given that Kunstmuseum Basel is currently staging the largest European survey of Frankenthaler's work to date. The gallery also placed 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) at $2.5m and Doris Salcedo's Untitled (2008) at $1.35m. Almine Rech sold a Picasso painting, Satyre, Pan et nymphe (1938), for between $6m and $6.5m. The work was part of Art Basel's new Exclusive programme, in which galleries surprise attendees with pieces not included in pre-fair lists — a scheme designed to incentivise in-person attendance, according to de Bellis.

Zwirner, Pace and Beyond

David Zwirner reported selling its Unlimited sector installation by Isa Genzken for €1.2m to a European museum, alongside two new paintings by Victor Man, one of which went for €1m. Additional placements included works by Joan Mitchell, Yayoi Kusama, Gerhard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Pace recorded steady transactions, led by Lynda Benglis's Power Tower (2019) at $1.4m, Robert Longo's Untitled (Gerhard's Forest) (2026) at $750,000, and Kenneth Noland's Half & Half (1967) at $500,000. Further sales included works by Loie Hollowell, Nigel Cooke and Elmgreen & Dragset.

At Xavier Hufkens, a Louise Bourgeois sculpture sold for more than $2.2m. The gallery also placed two David Hockney works, including the large-scale Studio Interior #2 (2014) for $8.5m and an iPad drawing from the artist's Yorkshire landscape series for $650,000.

Karma sold Jonas Wood's Bonsai #13 (2026) for just under $1m, alongside works by Kathleen Ryan, Maja Ruznic and Woody De Othello. In the Unlimited sector, the gallery placed Ulala Imai's panoramic triptych STUDIO (2026) with an institutional collection for $275,000.