Warhol, O'Keeffe pieces among those for sale at new Sotheby's exhibition in Palm Beach

After four months of preparation, Sotheby's will unveil its first art exhibition of the town's winter season Saturday.

“Contemporary and Modern Masters,” a selling exhibition showcasing artists who shaped the 20th century and beyond, runs through Jan. 7 at the auction house's Palm Beach gallery.

Twenty works from celebrated artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keeffe are featured in the exhibition, which marks Sotheby's fourth season in Palm Beach.

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David Rothschild, senior vice president and senior specialist in private sales for Sotheby's, has been working since the summer to curate the exhibition.

"We're extremely excited to come back for our fourth season to display these blue-chip masters from modern and post-war collecting categories," Rothschild told the Daily News. "We're beyond excited. This has been a labor of love putting this exhibition together over the last four months."

The new exhibition follows a record-setting auction hosted by Sotheby's Nov. 8 at its New York City gallery. Thirty-one pieces from the Emily Fisher Landau collection netted $406.4 million at the sale, Sotheby's said, including a painting by Pablo Picasso for $139.4 million and one by Ed Ruscha for $39.4 million.

Additional paintings by Jasper Johns, Mark Tansey, Cy Twombly, and others also sold at the event, which joins the ranks of the most valuable single-owner auctions ever staged, Sotheby's said.

"Seeing Twombly sell for $28 million, seeing Picasso sell for $140 million, (seeing) Agnes Martin sell for $18 million, and a record for Mark Tansey at $11.8 million, we feel really good about the market, particularly at the high end," Rothschild said. "We're extremely excited to bring this high-quality exhibition to Palm Beachers and people who are visiting South Florida around the holidays."

Rothschild said he and his team assembled the Palm Beach exhibition to appeal to a local audience. Palm Beach art collectors, he said, value the "pillars and leaders" of post-impressionist, modern, post-war and contemporary art, but they also want to explore up-and-coming artists.

Those artists will be featured at future shows this season, Rothschild said. "We'll have more thematic, lower-value shows featuring some younger, emerging artists," he said. "But to kick off the season, we wanted to really showcase high-quality works of pillars of the modern and post-war genres."

Prices for each piece at the Palm Beach exhibition range from $1 million to $20 million, Rothschild said.

Art enthusiasts will have an additional several weeks to look over each piece, as Sotheby's has committed to hosting fewer exhibitions that are longer in length this season. "We decided after looking at the data from last year that we wanted to make the exhibitions a little longer, but higher quality," Rothschild said. "I think it'll work well for us."

As Sotheby's debuts its newest exhibition, Rothschild noted that demand for high-quality works such as the ones showcased in Palm Beach continues to rise. Last year, Sotheby’s private sales garnered $1.2 billion worldwide, and the auction house is on track to match that number in 2023, Rothschild said. Over the last five years, Sotheby’s private sales, which includes regional galleries such as Palm Beach, have grossed $5.6 billion in sales across 85 countries covering 52 categories of fine art and luxury property.

"We’ve consistently seen the masterpiece market attract strong demand from collectors globally," Rothschild said.

In Palm Beach, Sotheby's has sold works by more than 50 distinct artists to its collector base, and has achieved more than $130 million in sales across more than 350 transactions, Rothschild said.

He hopes a fourth season on the island will be just as successful as the first three.

"We hope and anticipate that the high end of the market will remain strong for both art and real estate," he said. "We look back at what has sold well and what has commanded more of an audience, and it's really the high-value, high-quality artworks that are priced in line with the market that is attracting buyers, but also art lovers to come and see."

Sotheby's is at 50 Cocoanut Row, Suite 101. For more information, visit www.sothebys.com/en/about/locations/palm-beach.

Jodie Wagner is a journalist at the Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at jwagner@pbdailynews.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Sotheby's exhibit focuses on masters of modern, post-war art