By the end of Tuesday’s VIP preview day, it was clear that sales at Art Basel’s flagship fair were noticeably stronger than in 2025, with plenty of transactions being completed shortly after the doors to the Messe opened. Yet, for as strong as sales were, dealers repeatedly cautioned ARTnews that this was not a return to the post-Covid days of frenzied speculative buying, but rather something more measured, particularly where it concerned the big-ticket works.
As collectors thinned out late in the afternoon, I was told by dealers more than once to come back later in the hopes that deals would close soon. To be fair, it understandably takes longer to place a monumental bronze sculpture like Henry Moore’s crowd-stopping Large Four Piece Reclining Figure (1972–73, cast 1984), measuring over 6½ feet by 13 feet by 6 feet. Similar late-career Moore sculptures of reclining figures have sold for as much as $32.7 million. While Gagosian, which was offering the work, did not provide a price, the piece was still available by close of business Tuesday. (Gagosian did report one sale, for a 1984 Willem de Kooning painting for “a high seven-figure sum” to an “important private collection in Asia,” per the gallery.)
