Despite his influential role as media mogul, S.I. Newhouse Jr., the longtime leader of Condé Nast and Advance Publications, who died in 2017, was famously opaque, shy and socially awkward.
But he was bold and crystal clear about the kind of paintings and sculptures he wanted to buy — the best of the best, purchases which over the years amounted to one of the leading art collections in the country.
Those prizes included a large horizontal Jackson Pollock drip painting from 1948 (“Number 7A”) and a regal Constantin Brancusi head of bronze and gold leaf from 1913 (“Danaïde”).
Now on May 18, these two artworks, along with 14 other choice pieces, are coming up for auction at Christie’s in an evening sale that is expected to bring in a total of more than $450 million.
“It’s almost like a mantra: quality, provenance and rarity,” said Tobias Meyer, the former principal auctioneer at Sotheby’s, who has advised the Newhouse collection since 1998 and formally became its representative after Newhouse died. “You go into these rooms that he had, and you say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe that’s here.’”
The Newhouse Collection will be offered as a single-owner sale before the 20th Century Evening Sale. The collection is the most valuable in Christie’s May Marquee Week, which also includes works from the museum patron Agnes Gund and the collector Lorinda Payson de Roulet (both also on May 18); and of the longtime gallerist Marian Goodman (May 20).
The public can preview the Newhouse Collection at Christie’s Rockefeller Center location from May 9 until May 18.
Each of these pieces “situates a moment in our history when things change dramatically,” said Max Carter, Christie’s global chairman of 20th and 21st century art. “It’s really the first and best of everything.”
This is the fourth tranche from the Newhouse collection at Christie’s. The first three brought a total of $415.8 million. At a sale in 2023, a 1969 self-portrait by Francis Bacon fetched $34.6 million with fees. Together, all four sales are expected to exceed $1 billion.
Victoria Newhouse, his widow, now 87, is selling some work in part because she is moving to a smaller apartment. “I’m not getting any younger and I feel the time has come to start downsizing,” she said in an interview. “It’s an effort to simplify my life.”
That life, during which Newhouse presided over Condé Nast — which owns The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest — included the purchase and sale of many museum-worthy works of art. He and Victoria spent every Saturday trolling galleries.
In 1991, when the Newhouses moved from a townhouse to a U.N. Plaza apartment, many pieces were sold to the music mogul David Geffen.
“He loved the pursuit,” Victoria said. “Some people criticized him for buying and selling. The simple reason was we only showed in our home and so we had a limited amount of space. He was sorry to part with things he had bought and enjoyed. But he loved the chase.”
Meyer, the art adviser, said Newhouse viewed adding and subtracting as simply part of the collecting process. “He was always editing,” he said. “He wasn’t sentimental about selling things. He was able to move on.”
In his foreword to the auction catalog, Meyer says Newhouse “was, and remains to this day, the most important client of my life.” He added that when Newhouse bought Andy Warhol’s iconic 1964 image of Marilyn Monroe, “Orange Marilyn,” for the record price of $17.3 million, in a 1998 auction led by Meyer, “he also brought me to the attention of the global art market. Suddenly people looked at me differently.”
The Brancusi — which is said to have been inspired by the artist’s encounter with the young Hungarian art student Margit Pogany — sold in 2002 for $18.2 million (about $33 million in today’s dollars), setting a record not only for the artist but also for any sculpture at auction. It and the Pollock are each estimated to sell for about $100 million in May.
The Pollock marks the beginning of “action” painting in Abstract Expressionism, some of which changed the center of gravity from Paris and Europe to New York, Carter said, and its size — about three by 11 feet — “is unheard-of at auction.”
“We’re used to selling works that are approximately a tenth the size of this,” he added.
Meyer wrote that he sold Newhouse the Pollock in a private transaction. “We sat on the windowsill and he looked at the transparency and exhaled loudly. Then he handed it back and said: ‘I’ll take it,’” Meyer writes. “I looked at him and asked, ‘Don’t you want see it first?’”
Newhouse responded that he had seen it in the apartment of the designer Herbert Matter in the late ’60s and with the art dealer Harold Diamond in the ’80s “‘and I did not buy it,’” Meyer recounts. “‘Now I am buying it.’”
The Pollock hung in Newhouse’s dining room, Meyer said, along with a de Kooning woman, a Jasper Johns and — also in the Christie’s sale — Picasso’s 1909 head “Tête de femme (Fernande),” which Carter described as “cubism in three dimensions.”
Newhouse was as decisive a collector as he was a media chieftain — researching works, trusting his own judgment and overpaying for pieces he considered worthy.
His purchases were influenced early on by Barnett Newman, the painter and sculptor, as well as by the art critic Clement Greenberg. Newhouse started by focusing on de Kooning, Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg (there is an early “combine” in the sale, one of that artist’s famous framed collages). Johns became his favorite.
He grew interested in Picasso and Cézanne, then Matisse and Mondrian. Eventually he expanded to contemporary artists like Marlene Dumas, John Currin and Lucian Freud. “Once I took him and Victoria to Chatsworth in a helicopter to look at Rembrandt drawings there,” Meyer writes in his foreword.
“Si not only had a great eye,” he added in an interview, “but also a great mind.”
Also in the sale is Picasso’s 1913 oil “Homme à la guitare,” which is believed to be the only remaining major Cubist painting from that year still in private hands, Carter said, and “the most significant painting from 1913 full stop, including works in museums.” (The 1912 to 1914 period was key in cubism.) In the painting, the artist is “breaking the images apart,” Carter said, “flattening the picture plane.”
Meyer said Picasso made a point of giving the painting to the author Gertrude Stein. “It’s not just somebody walking into a gallery and saying, ‘Well, that’s pretty.’” he said. “It’s Picasso saying, ‘I want you to own this so that you can explain how cubism develops and how my work develops.’” It is estimated at $35 million to $55 million.
Victoria Newhouse said she continues to collect and takes comfort in living with the pieces purchased by and with her husband. But she also feels ready to part with some of them. “The art has helped me have his presence with me in the apartment,” she said. “But time passes, and I think one has to move on.”
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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