#christies

#christies

In 2018, Christie's catapulted AI artwork into the mainstream when they sold the Paris-based collective Obvious's GANS inkprint Portrait of Le Comte de Belamy (2018) for $432,500, dwarfing the work's high estimate of $10,000. And, few could forget the March 2021 sale of Beeple's digital work Everyday: The First 5000 Days (2021), which hammered at $69.3m (the house applied no estimate) and put NFTs on the art world map.

Judging by recent auction records that have been set by numerous artists from the Arab world and conversations with curators of major collections across the globe, it seems that demand for Arab art has expanded beyond the region into Western and Eastern collections.

"After being cherished for multiple generations in a family collection and being generously lent to museum exhibitions around the world, we are honoured to present this Impressionist masterpiece," Vanessa Fusco, the head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie's New York, said in a statement.