NEW YORK — Auction records for two 20th-century masters were broken Monday night in Christie’s salesroom at Rockefeller Center. A turbulent 1948 “drip” painting that Jackson Pollock created by dropping, dripping and pouring oil and enamel paint onto a canvas spread out on the floor of his barn in Springs, New York, has sold for $181.2 million, including fees. Minutes earlier, a bronze head sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, around 1913, fetched US$107.6 million.
The two sales were part of a $630.8 million auction featuring 16 works from the estate of media mogul — and obsessive art collector — SI Newhouse, who died in 2017 at age 89.
The auction of the estate and a second auction, also on Monday night, with works of art from the 20th century, totaled US$ 1.1 billion, a result at the upper limit of the expected range, with many pieces exceeding their maximum estimates. It was the latest sign that the top of the art market is coming back to life after several years of decline, driven by treasures recently released by major patrons whose estates have hit the market, such as Newhouse, Robert Mnuchin, Agnes Gund and Henry McNeil Jr.
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It took just seven minutes of fierce competition for Pollock’s “Number 7A, 1948” to surpass the abstract expressionist artist’s previous auction record of $61.2 million (or $73 million adjusted for inflation) paid for a much smaller example sold by Sotheby’s five years ago.
Bids mostly came in $1 million increments. “I’m not going to complain,” said auctioneer Adrien Meyer, recording the value as it surpassed the previous record.
And just as the dispute began to cool down, at around $154 million, a new bidder entered the fray, pushing the final hammer price to $157 million, before the buyer’s fees were added.
Newhouse’s 11-foot-long canvas was Pollock’s first large-scale “drip” painting to come to auction since 1961, according to Christie’s. Pollock’s dripping technique “was as radical as Duchamp’s urinal and Picasso’s cubism,” said Alex Rotter, global president of Christie’s.
Two other “drip” paintings from 1948 were sold in private negotiations for $140 million (in 2006) and $200 million (in 2015). But the artist’s major postwar works rarely make it to auction. “I started in the auction business 27 years ago and never owned a Pollock,” Rotter said.
The Newhouse collection, considered the most valuable to be offered in this season’s high-profile sales season in New York — which ends on Thursday — was expected to bring in more than $450 million. Estimates are calculated without the additional premium of buyer fees.
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Another highlight of the set, the sculpture “Danaïde”, by Brancusi, in bronze and gold leaf, was estimated at US$100 million. Newhouse purchased the elegantly sculpted head—inspired by the Romanian artist’s encounter with a young Hungarian art student named Margit Pogany—for $18.2 million in 2002 (about $33 million in today’s money). At the time, it was the highest price ever paid at auction for a sculpture.
On Monday, the work once again made history on the market, surpassing Brancusi’s previous auction record of US$71.2 million in 2018 (around US$94 million in inflation-adjusted values). Before the sale, Christie’s created some pop buzz by releasing a promotional video in which Nicole Kidman visits the galleries and dances around the sculpture to David Bowie’s “Golden Years.”
A new wave of patrons
In the last three years, many collectors preferred to keep their “trophies” and wait out the market turmoil. But the tide began to turn in the second half of last year, when several valuable estates went up for auction, including that of cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder. The success of extremely expensive works tends to energize the “downstream” market, and a portrait of Gustav Klimt, which sold for a record $236.4 million at Sotheby’s in November, appeared to lift the mood of buyers and sellers.
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Considering the results of the Newhouse collection, 28 works by 17 artists have already been sold at auction for more than US$100 million, including fees (without adjustment for inflation), according to data from the market intelligence company Arthur Analytics. The most expensive work remains “Salvator Mundi”, by Leonardo da Vinci, which shocked the art sector by reaching US$450.3 million at Christie’s in November 2017. Pablo Picasso is the artist who has surpassed US$100 million the most times at auction, with six lots reaching that mark. Gustav Klimt and Alberto Giacometti did this with three works each, and Amedeo Modigliani and Andy Warhol, with two each.
In total, the spring auctions are expected to fetch up to $2.6 billion.
The bonanza season began on May 14 at Sotheby’s, which sold $433.1 million worth of art in a single night — a significant improvement over May of last year. The highest-profile lot was a red Mark Rothko abstraction from the estate of banker-turned-dealer Robert Mnuchin, which fetched $85.8 million with fees but fell short of the artist’s auction record. (This level was established in 2012 by a 1961 work that sold for almost US$87 million, or about US$126 million in today’s values.)
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“It’s an iconic composition, with a very demanding presence,” said Drew Watson, who runs art services at Bank of America, of the recently sold Rothko painting. “It comes from the 1950s, which is the mature period of its production.”
On Monday night, that benchmark was surpassed by a 1964 Rothko painting from the Gund collection. “No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe)” sold for $98.4 million with fees.
The sale of the Newhouse collection represented the fourth “tranche” of works by the publisher and Condé Nast president to be put up for auction since his death. The first three generated a total of US$415.8 million. With the new lot, the total value of the collection sold more than doubled, exceeding US$1 billion.
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Newhouse was drawn to big names such as Picasso, Piet Mondrian and Jasper Johns, but often eschewed vibrant colors and conventional beauty, preferring historical relevance, according to experts. “None of these are ‘pretty’ trophy works,” said art consultant David Norman, who has not worked with the Newhouse family. “These are works for serious collectors, dense with meaning and art history.”
Among them was an early cubist painting by Picasso, “Homme à la guitare,” from 1913, which sold for $40.9 million with fees, and Mondrian’s lively “Composition With Large Red Plane, Blue, Gray, Black and Yellow,” from 1921, which fetched $39.7 million.
Smaller-scale records were also set Monday night. At the 20th century art auction, Alice Neel’s “Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia)” — a 1967 portrait of the artist’s wide-eyed daughter-in-law and restless first grandchild — sold for $5.7 million with fees. The painting, included in Neel’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021, had been in the same private collection since 1984. The result surpassed the US$3 million ($3.8 million in current values) paid for “Dr. Finger’s Waiting Room”, Neel’s still life, in May 2021 at Christie’s.
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