Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.As the fall auction season returns to New York, it does so under unusually uneven skies.This year’s major market events have played out like a series of plot twists: Art Basel in Switzerland, the bellwether of blue-chip appetite, left many dealers underwhelmed in June, with insiders whispering that the fair failed to meet even muted expectations. Just a few months later, Frieze London and Art Basel Paris proved there was still plenty of life—and liquidity—left in the international scene: blockbuster attendance, busy VIP days, and renewed buzz around objects both rediscovered and resold. Even more tellingly, a run of indistinct auction totals (albeit with some very, very bright spots) in Hong Kong, London, and Paris signaled that collectors may be prepared to spend—so long as the offerings are exceptional, well-priced, and impeccably sourced. Add to that the results of last night’s New York mayoral election possibly impacting if people will buy more heavily now or consignors might withdraw lots, right before they are set to hit the block in a couple week’s time.That all sets the stage for this season’s evening sales in New York, where Christie’s and Sotheby’s have once again brought out the heavy artillery. But amid the estimates, guarantees, and breathless catalog copy lies a quieter narrative about who’s actually selling.The answer matters, particularly now, when the art market feels less like a monolith and more like a minefield—of taste, timing, and legacy management. Some of the consignors surfacing this season are long-established heavyweights, unloading with surgical precision. Others are estate handlers, museums, or collectors turning their paintings into philanthropy or posthumous punctuation marks.As always, not every seller wants to be named. But this is where the art world’s paper trail—catalogue raisonnés, exhibition histories, old press clippings—does some of its liveliest work. ARTnews combed through the lots in Christie’s and Sotheby’s evening sales, tracing provenance breadcrumbs from museum walls and private villas to storage crates and stacks of guarantee contracts. (ARTnews also researched the auctions being held by Phillips, which is also holding its New York sales for the season this month, but we were unable to determine any sellers.)Here’s what ARTnews was able to uncover.Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale (November 17)One of the most high-profile consignments ARTnews was able to uncover was for Frida Kahlo’s intimate 1931 painting Window Display on a Detroit Street (Aparador en una calle de Detroit). Christie’s provenance indicates the Miami-based owner acquired the work in 2012. In 2015, it was loaned to the Detroit Institute of Arts and was credited at that time to Francisco and Fiorella Pérez Díaz, the painting is now being offered at auction with an estimate of $6 million to $8 million. (Francisco is director at Miami-based investment advisory firm Adamo Capital.) The painting was originally purchased from Kahlo herself by Eduardo Morillo Safa back in 1953. Since then, it’s changed hands a precious few times, though never through a public auction.Then there’s a trio of French Post-Impressionist works—two of them by Paul Signac made in 1886, just as the artist was beginning to embrace Pointillism: Les Andelys, les bains (Opus no. 137, Les bains à Lucas), estimated at between $2.5 million and $3.5 million, and Les Andelys, Port Morin (Opus no. 136), estimated at between $1.5 million and $2.5 million. The third is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1890 painting of a woman in profile, Femme assise de profil vers la gauche. All three appear to be from the formidable collection of the late Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, who died in 2002 and was one of Argentina’s most influential art patrons. (If the name sounds familiar, it’s because her family was reported a few years ago to be the owner of a $300 million van Gogh.) In recent years, her heirs have encountered customs and regulatory challenges related to international export of her collection, which reportedly includes works by Monet, Degas, Gauguin, and van Gogh and is said to be worth $350 million.Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale (November 19)Christie’s has two major consignments from Bruce Bailey, the prominent Canadian collector. Proceeds from both works—Kerry James Marshall’s fierce 2007 work Portrait of John Punch (Angry Black Man 1646), estimated at between $4 million and $6 million, and Steven Shearer’s Drag II (2007), which has an estimate of $500,000 to $700,000—are said to benefit Bailey’s foundation. The Marshall was previously shown in an exhibition of Bailey’s collection at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts that opened in 2019.Then there’s a 2019 portrait by Marlene Dumas, De acteur (Portrait of Romana Vrede). The consignor is believed to be the Abrishamchi Family Collection, which is run by a group of Iranian collectors who focus on contemporary figurative art. De acteur was on view in a Dumas survey that ran in tandem with the 2022 Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Grassi.Sotheby’s Now and Contemporary Art Evening Sales (November 18)Henry Taylor’s 2017 painting Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi has a magnificent backstory: it features artist Cassi Namoda, Taylor’s partner at the time the picture was made. The painting also appears to have quite a provenance. According to a recent Washington Post story about Taylor’s recent traveling retrospective, the work belongs to LA gallerist Jeff Poe, formerly of Blum & Poe, and his wife Rosalie Benitez. In 2019, the couple bought the work directly from Taylor, whom Poe’s gallery represented. This month, it’s expected to sell for between $800,000 and $1.2 million.An untitled Kerry James Marshall work from 2008 that shows a couple basking in a yellow and orange sunset comes from the collection of Neda Young. The work was shown by the Sag Harbor–arts foundation, The Church, that featured loans from her in 2021. (ARTnews reported that back in October.) The Marshall work is estimated at a whopping $10 million to $15 million.Also revealed in October was the fact that one of the season’s flashiest blue-chip consignment coups, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1981 banger Crowns (Peso Neto),estimated at a thunderous $45 million, was consigned by the French actor Francis Lombrail—the same collector behind the $51.8 million sale of Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer at Christie’s in 2017. Painted on Christmas Day of Basquiat’s breakout year and first exhibited at Annina Nosei’s SoHo gallery before traveling to Documenta 7 the following year, the work has passed through the hands of early champion Thomas Worrell and the Mugrabi family.Another big-ticket lot in this sale is Cecily Brown’s early work High Society (1997–98), which sees the artist tightrope-walking the line between figuration and abstraction. “If I had to take an early painting that still has qualities that I’m really interested in, I think High Society would be it,” Brown said in 2020. The work, which is going for between $4 million and $6 million, likely comes from the collection of prominent Palm Beach philanthropists Martin and Toni Sosnoff, according to a Forbes article published on the heels of Brown’s mid-career retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art last year.And a fashion legend’s Warhol is returning to the block. Back in 2008, ARTnews reported that fashion legend Valentino Garavani had won Andy Warhol’s The American Indian (Russell Means) at a Sotheby’s contemporary art sale in November. (It was one of two Warhols he clinched that night.) Back then he paid $1.3 million—just under its then low estimate. Now, it’s returning to auction with a $2 million–$3 million estimate.A provenance for the imposing black-on-black Ad Reinhardt picture, Abstract Painting, Black (1954), states that the work was purchased by the present owner from Reinhardt’s estate in 1969. But when the painting appeared in shows at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau and London Royal Academy of Arts, the work was said to have been owned by Marlborough Fine Art, which closed its doors after 80 years in 2024, with plans to sell off its inventory. Sotheby’s expects Abstract Painting, Blackto sell for between $1.2 million and $1.8 million. Sotheby’s “Exquisite Corpus” Sale (November 20)Rounding things out at Sotheby’s is what may be the most intriguing consignment cluster of the season: the Surrealism trove in Sotheby’s “Exquisite Corpus” sale that comes from a single owner.Dorothea Tanning’s eerily sensual Interior with Sudden Joy (1951), estimated at $2 million to $3 million; Max Ernst’s shamanic 1940 picture J’ai bu du tabourin, j’ai mangé du cymbal, estimated at $1.2 million to $1.8 million; and Kay Sage’s angular The Point of Intersection (1952–53), estimated at between $1 million and $1.5 million, all trace back to the legendary Daniel Filipacchi, a former ARTnews Top 200 Collector. When Filipacchi and Nesuhi Ertegun’s collection was exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York in 1999, the New York Times called it a “powerful exhibition.”Christie’s and Sotheby’s declined to comment for this report. But the paper trail rarely lies. As the evening sales kick off, provenance and circumstance paint their own picture.