The Best Bargain in Art This Fall Is a Tiny $650,000 Sculpture

Abstract expressionist John Chamberlain took the gestural force of Jackson Pollock’s paintings and rendered it in three dimensions. His most famous sculptures—mammoth car doors and hoods bent and crushed into submission—are almost by definition grandiose and heroic: the artist inflicting his physicality on inanimate objects. So it may come as a surprise that in the late 1980s Chamberlain made smaller sculptures, some no bigger than a foot tall, as part of a series he called “Baby Tycoons.” In pieces such as Winter Philodendron from 1992 ($650,000), the gesture of the artist’s hand in miniature becomes something more delicate and engrossing.

• Alexander Calder’s tabletop sculptures regularly come to auction with estimates of as low as $300,000.