Auction records for two 20th-century masters shattered at Christie’s Rockefeller Center salesroom on Monday night. A swirling “drip” painting from 1948 that Jackson Pollock created by flinging, drizzling and pouring oil paint and enamel across the surface of a canvas he rolled out on the floor of his barn in Springs, N.Y., sold for $181.2 million with fees. Just minutes earlier, a bronze head sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, from around 1913, brought in $107.6 million, with buyer’s fees.
The two nine-figure sales were part of a cache of 16 works from the estate of the publishing magnate — and obsessive art collector — S.I. Newhouse, who died in 2017 at age 89.
The auction is the latest sign that the top of the art market is springing back to life after several years of contraction, with the help of treasures recently released into the market by estates of major patrons like Newhouse, Robert Mnuchin, Agnes Gund and Henry McNeil Jr.
It took only seven minutes of fierce bidding for Pollock’s “Number 7A, 1948” to eclipse the Abstract Expressionist artist’s previous auction record of $61.2 million (or $73 million, accounting for inflation), for a much smaller example that Sotheby’s sold five years ago.
The bids were mostly in increments of $1 million. “I won’t complain,” said the auctioneer Adrien Meyer, recording the number as it cranked passed the previous record.
And just as bidding started to die down, around $154 million, a new bidder entered the battle, pushing the final hammer price to $157 million, before the auction house added buyer’s fees.
Newhouse’s nearly 11-foot-long canvas was the first large-scale drip painting by Pollock to be auctioned since 1961, according to Christie’s. Pollock’s drip technique “was as radical as Duchamp’s urinal and Picasso’s cubism,” said Alex Rotter, Christie’s global president.
Two other 1948 drip paintings have sold privately for $140 million (in 2006) and $200 million (in 2015). But major postwar works by the artist rarely come to auction. “I started 27 years ago in the auction business, and I’ve never had a Pollock,” Rotter said.
The most valuable collection offered during this spring’s weeklong marquee sales in New York, which end Thursday, the Newhouse lots were expected to bring in more than $450 million. Another star of the group, Brancusi’s bronze-and-gold-leaf sculpture “Danaïde,” carried a $100 million estimate. Newhouse bought the elegantly rendered 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 dollars). At the time, it was the highest price ever paid at auction for a sculpture.
On Monday, that work made market history again, eclipsing Brancusi’s auction record of $71.2 million in 2018 (or around $94 million with inflation). Ahead of the sale, Christie’s drummed up some pop-culture buzz by releasing a promotional video of Nicole Kidman visiting the galleries and dancing around the sculpture to David Bowie’s “Golden Years.”
All 16 of Newhouse’s works carried a third-party guarantee, meaning that the auction house had secured an agreement from others to pay a minimum price for each artwork. The chatter among industry veterans was that one buyer had guaranteed nearly the entire Newhouse collection. (Christie’s declined to comment.)
An Infusion of Patrons
For the past three years, many collectors decided to hold onto their trophies and wait out the market’s choppy waters. But the tide began to turn in the second half of last year when several valuable estates came to auction, including that of the cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder. The success of extremely expensive artworks tends to energize the market downstream, and a Gustav Klimt portrait, which sold for a record $236.4 million at Sotheby’s in November, seemed to improve the mood of buyers and sellers.
This season’s auction bonanza began on May 14 at Sotheby’s, which sold $433.1 million worth of art in one night, a marked improvement over May of last year. The evening’s top lot was a red abstract painting by Mark Rothko from the estate of the banker-turned-art-dealer Robert Mnuchin, which brought in $85.8 million with fees but fell short of Rothko’s auction record. (That benchmark was set in 2012 by a 1961 work that sold for almost $87 million, or nearly $126 million in today’s dollars.) All told, the spring auctions are expected to tally up to $2.6 billion.
“It’s an iconic composition with a very demanding presence,” said Drew Watson, who directs art services at Bank of America, of the recently sold Rothko painting. “It comes from the 1950s, which is the mature period of his output.”
Zachary Small contributed reporting.
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