The Second Look: Before Bidding Begins at the November Marquee Auctions 

For about 10 days each November, Christie’s and Sotheby’s become two of New York’s most compelling temporary museums. Paintings that have spent decades in private collections hang alongside works that have rarely, if ever, been exhibited publicly. Soon they will be sold, many returning to private homes where they may not be seen again for years.

I recently spent time at both auction houses, looking at works that will be offered in this month’s sales. One of the pleasures of these previews is seeing paintings I have known for years through photographs, catalogues and scholarship. But no matter how familiar an image may be, there is often a moment of surprise when I stand in front of the actual work.

Gustav Klimt’s Litzlbergkeller, at Christie’s, is a beautiful example. The intricacy and delicacy of the painted surface are striking: the foliage is built from countless small touches of color, and the water in the foreground seems to shimmer. From across the room, it is a lakeside view of an inn among the trees. Up close, it becomes a field of separate strokes. Each step closer or farther away changes what you see. It is the sort of experience that requires more than a passing glance and that reminds us of the rewards of slowing down.

In 2001, researchers Jeffrey and Lisa Smith observed visitors looking at six paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including masterpieces by Rembrandt, Cézanne and Emanuel Leutze. The average viewing time was just 27.2 seconds, with a median of 17 seconds. A later study at the Art Institute of Chicago produced a nearly identical average of 28.63 seconds.

Twenty-seven seconds is enough time to recognize a subject, identify an artist, read a label and perhaps take a photograph. But how much have we actually seen?

Art dealer Michael Findlay has spent much of his career thinking about that question. In his 2017 book Seeing Slowly: Looking at Modern Art, he makes a persuasive case for giving our eyes and minds time to respond to a work of art before we turn to the information surrounding it.

Findlay, who has spent more than six decades in the art business, including years at Christie’s and Acquavella Galleries, is hardly dismissive of scholarship, provenance or the art market. His point is that none of these should take precedence over the experience of looking. “I’m not against information about art. Not at all. I can’t sell a painting without giving people information about it,” he told Introspective magazine in 2017. “But I’d like to reestablish the primacy of the visual experience. I think information should follow visual engagement.”

I have recommended his book to collectors and discussed his ideas with him on my podcast, Reading the Art World. What I find particularly valuable is his insistence that looking is an active process, one that doesn’t require an advanced degree in art history. It requires attention, curiosity and a willingness to form our own judgments.

Those qualities can be hardest to summon when we know a great deal about what we are looking at, when expertise becomes a challenge to looking at things with fresh eyes. The more we know about an artist, the easier it can become to recognize the familiar and overlook the particular. We may understand the artist’s place in history, the development of a style and the significance of a work without having looked closely enough at the object in front of us.

At Christie’s, I was struck by the scale of Wassily Kandinsky’s Betonte Ecken. It was much larger than I had expected. Even though I’d read the dimensions in the catalog, I’d only looked at the image online. But there is another challenge with a painting like this. We recognize Kandinsky’s distinctive vocabulary of geometric forms and color, mentally check the box marked “Kandinsky,” and move on.

Spend more time with it, however, and the individual forms begin to work together in increasingly complex ways. Lines, angles and colors establish rhythms and tensions across the composition. What initially appears to be an arrangement of separate elements begins to reveal a larger orchestration. Knowing Kandinsky’s interest in music and the synthesis of the arts adds another dimension to the experience, but it is the painting itself that first makes those relationships visible.

I have a similar challenge with Georgia O’Keeffe. I’ve worked with her paintings for many years, and I know her visual language well enough that it’s easy to think I’ve taken everything in at a glance. I recognize the forms, the colors, the way she simplifies and distills the landscape. But familiarity can be a shortcut, and sometimes I have to remind myself to keep looking.

Her Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I, also at Christie’s, makes an unusually good case for doing so. Painted in 1930, a year after O’Keeffe’s first trip to New Mexico, it depicts Lobo Peak, north of Taos, and is likely the first of three versions of the subject. For decades it was known only through a 1931 photograph and an entry in the artist’s catalogue raisonné. Earlier this year, it was found in a box at the back of an East Village closet, where its owner had put it away in the mid-1980s. For scholars, the photograph was the painting. Now the painting itself can be seen.

It measures just 10 by 24 inches. O’Keeffe reduces the hills to a few distilled forms, and soft transitions of color and tone create a sense of distance and atmosphere far larger than the canvas. There is so much landscape contained within such a small, carefully organized space that the painting seems to expand as you look at it.

Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts has developed an illuminating exercise to counter the habit of recognizing rather than seeing. Writing in Harvard Magazine in 2013, she described asking her students, before doing any research, to spend three full hours looking at a single work of art, noting their observations and questions as they go. Her own experience with John Singleton Copley’s A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, shows why. “It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape of the boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff along the squirrel’s belly,” she wrote. It was 21 minutes before she registered “that the fingers holding the chain exactly span the diameter of the water glass beneath them.” And it took “a good 45 minutes” to realize that the seemingly random folds in the background curtain “are actually perfect copies of the shapes of the boy’s ear and eye.”

Roberts’s point is not that every painting requires three hours. It is that certain discoveries are simply unavailable to us until we have spent enough time looking.

Recent research supports the idea. In a study published in 2025, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroaesthetics asked 34 participants to look at four objects at the Penn Museum. They looked at two freely, with no time limit or instructions, and the other two in a guided 15-minute session divided into three five-minute stages. After the slower, guided looking, participants rated the objects as more beautiful and reported feeling more enraptured, more compassionate and more edified. They did not, however, like the objects any more. Looking longer didn’t change whether people liked what they saw. It changed the nature of the experience.

Paul Cézanne’s Pichet et fruits sur une table, an oil on paper laid down on panel at Sotheby’s, is a painting that seems to change as we look at it. At first, we see a pitcher, fruit and the familiar elements of a still life. Stay with it, and the relationships among the objects and the space around them grow less certain. Perspectives that initially appear contradictory begin to establish their own visual logic, as though the objects had been observed from more than one position at once. The composition resolves, dissolves and resolves again.

This is one of the great pleasures of looking at Cézanne. The painting never becomes entirely settled. Our perception remains active, continually reconsidering how the objects and the space around them fit together.

Wayne Thiebaud’s Girl in White Boots, at Christie’s, looks straightforward in reproduction: a boldly depicted figure against a spare background. In person, its imposing scale and emphatically physical surface change the experience. The figure is outlined in multiple colors, with thick passages of glossy white paint spread around the contours almost like frosting. What initially seems simple becomes much more complex, as the paint itself asserts a presence as strong as the subject.

At Sotheby’s, Edgar Degas’s Avant la course, a pastel from the Blaquier-Arrieta Collection, offers a different lesson. The restless arrangement of horses and riders before a race, with its abrupt framing and seemingly incidental composition, has an immediacy we now associate with photography. We are so accustomed to this way of organizing an image that it is easy to forget how radical it was in Degas’s time. Looking carefully can help us recover something of that original sense of surprise. The medium matters, too: pastel has a texture and luminosity that reproductions flatten.

Also at Sotheby’s, Cecily Brown’s Untitled (Shipwreck), from the Hedreen Collection, is more than 12 feet wide, too large to take in from a single position. The eye searches across it for figures, movement, and space, while the painting resists settling into a single reading. Sotheby’s points to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as a source for its structure, but it is worth looking for yourself before reading that.

Of course, spending more time with a work does not always increase our admiration for it. Sometimes the opposite happens. A composition that initially seems convincing may begin to feel unresolved, or a passage that first appears exciting may become less interesting on closer examination. I’ve certainly had that experience at auction previews, although professional discretion prevents me from naming the paintings that failed to survive my second look.

That, too, is one of the rewards of looking carefully. We aren’t obliged to like a work more simply because we’ve spent more time with it. The value lies in arriving at a more considered response, whatever that response may be. The distinction between looking at an image and looking at an actual work of art has become especially important as more collectors make acquisitions remotely.

In printed catalogs and on screens, paintings of vastly different dimensions appear at roughly the same scale. A small canvas fills a page or a monitor, while a monumental painting is reduced to a manageable rectangle. Even when I know the measurements, I am often surprised when I see a work in person. Something I expected to be large turns out to be intimate; another painting has a physical presence I hadn’t anticipated. The O’Keeffe is an extreme case, since for decades a photograph was all anyone had. But every work in these sales is, in some measure, a different thing in person than on the screen.

Besides scale, there is the surface, texture, color, the way light moves across the paint and the relationship between the object and the space around it that all contribute to what we see. It takes time for our eyes and minds to reconcile the familiar reproduction with the physical object.

According to the 2026 Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting, 53 percent of high-net-worth collectors who bought from dealers had purchased through Instagram without seeing the work in person, and 50 percent had bought by email or telephone without a viewing. Digital images have made the market more accessible and transactions more efficient, but they cannot convey everything about a work of art.

For collectors, this has practical implications. An image may be sufficient to identify a work of interest, but it cannot fully communicate its physical qualities. Condition reports, provenance research and market analysis remain essential parts of evaluating an acquisition. But they answer different questions than looking does. No one can tell us precisely how we will respond when we stand in front of the work.

When I visit an auction preview, gallery or art fair, I try to look at the work before reading too much about it. I move closer, step back and sometimes return after looking at other things. I pay attention to whether my initial response changes, whether something continues to interest me or whether a painting that seemed promising begins to lose its hold.

There is no prescribed number of minutes, and not every artwork asks for the same kind of attention. Sometimes a work makes an immediate impression that remains convincing. Others reveal themselves gradually, and some never quite come together. What matters is allowing ourselves enough time to find out.

The November auction previews offer an unusually rich opportunity to do this. So does the ADAA Fair at the Park Avenue Armory from November 13 to 16, where works from different periods and traditions can be seen in a more intimate setting. And, of course, museums offer the same opportunity every day, without the additional complication of a price tag.

I could go on about the paintings in this month’s sales, but the greater pleasure is discovering what catches your own attention. It may be a celebrated masterpiece, a modest work by an unfamiliar artist or something you had passed without noticing on your first walk through the galleries.

The auction houses will soon determine what these works are worth to their next owners. Some will sell for extraordinary sums, others for less than expected. There is still time to look at them without knowing the outcome, and perhaps to discover something that wasn’t apparent the first time around.

Megan Fox Kelly is an art advisor and the host of Reading the Art World, a live interview and podcast series with leading art world authors. The conversations explore timely subjects in the world of art, design, architecture, artists and the art market, and are an opportunity to engage further with the minds behind these insightful new publications. Listen to the podcast on Spotify and Apple.