Auction records for two 20th-century masters shattered at Christie\u2019s Rockefeller Center salesroom on Monday night. A swirling \u201cdrip\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The two sales were part of a $630.8 million auction of 16 works from the estate of the publishing magnate \u2014 and obsessive art collector \u2014 S.I. Newhouse, who died in 2017 at age 89.<\/p>\n
The estate sale and a second auction on Monday evening of 20th century artworks sold for a combined $1.1 billion, coming in at the top end of the expected range, and with many artworks selling above their high estimates. It was the latest sign that the top of the art market was 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.<\/p>\n
It took only seven minutes of fierce bidding for Pollock\u2019s \u201cNumber 7A, 1948\u201d to eclipse the Abstract Expressionist artist\u2019s previous auction record of $61.2 million (or $73 million, accounting for inflation), for a much smaller example that Sotheby\u2019s sold five years ago.<\/p>\n
The bids were mostly in increments of $1 million. \u201cI won\u2019t complain,\u201d said the auctioneer Adrien Meyer, recording the number as it cranked past the previous record.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s fees.<\/p>\n
Newhouse\u2019s nearly 11-foot-long canvas was the first large-scale drip painting by Pollock to be auctioned since 1961, according to Christie\u2019s. Pollock\u2019s drip technique \u201cwas as radical as Duchamp\u2019s urinal and Picasso\u2019s cubism,\u201d said Alex Rotter, Christie\u2019s global president.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cI started 27 years ago in the auction business, and I\u2019ve never had a Pollock,\u201d Rotter said.<\/p>\n
The most valuable collection offered during this spring\u2019s weeklong marquee sales in New York, which end Thursday, the Newhouse lots had been expected to bring in more than $450 million. Estimates are calculated without the added premium of buyer\u2019s fees.<\/p>\n
Another star of the group, Brancusi\u2019s bronze-and-gold-leaf sculpture \u201cDana\u00efde,\u201d carried a $100 million estimate. Newhouse bought the elegantly rendered head \u2014 inspired by the Romanian artist\u2019s encounter with a young Hungarian art student named Margit Pogany \u2014 for $18.2 million in 2002 (about $33 million in today\u2019s dollars). At the time, it was the highest price ever paid at auction for a sculpture.<\/p>\n
On Monday, that work made market history again, eclipsing Brancusi\u2019s auction record of $71.2 million in 2018 (or around $94 million with inflation). Ahead of the sale, Christie\u2019s drummed up some pop-culture buzz by releasing a promotional video<\/a> of Nicole Kidman visiting the galleries and dancing around the sculpture to David Bowie\u2019s \u201cGolden Years.\u201d<\/p>\n All 16 of Newhouse\u2019s 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\u2019s declined to comment.)<\/p>\n \u201cThe sale was all killer with not much filler,\u201d said Stephanie Armstrong, managing partner of the art advisory Beaumont Nathan. \u201cIt was geared toward a certain caliber of collector, and the reality is there are relatively few at that level in today\u2019s market.\u201d<\/p>\n An Infusion of Patrons<\/p>\n For the past three years, many collectors decided to hold onto their trophies and wait out the market\u2019s choppy waters. But the tide began to turn<\/a> 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<\/a> at Sotheby\u2019s in November, seemed to improve the mood of buyers and sellers.<\/p>\n Counting the Newhouse results, 28 artworks by 17 artists have sold at auction for more than $100 million with fees (excluding inflation), according to data from the market intelligence firm Arthur Analytics. The most expensive remains Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s \u201cSalvator Mundi,\u201d which shocked the art industry by making $450.3 million at Christie\u2019s in November 2017. Picasso has surpassed $100 million at auction most frequently, with six lots achieving this milestone. Gustav Klimt and Alberto Giacometti have done so with three artworks each, and Amedeo Modigliani and Andy Warhol with two apiece<\/p>\n All told, the spring auctions are expected to tally up to $2.6 billion. The season\u2019s bonanza began on May 14 at Sotheby\u2019s, which sold $433.1 million worth of art in one night, a marked improvement over May of last year. The evening\u2019s 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\u2019s auction record. (That benchmark was set<\/a> in 2012 by a 1961 work that sold for almost $87 million, or nearly $126 million in today\u2019s dollars.)<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an iconic composition with a very demanding presence,\u201d said Drew Watson, who directs art services at Bank of America, of the recently sold Rothko painting. \u201cIt comes from the 1950s, which is the mature period of his output.\u201d<\/p>\n By Monday evening, the painting\u2019s benchmark was surpassed by a 1964 Rothko canvas from the Gund collection. \u201cNo. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe)\u201d sold for $98.4 million with fees.<\/p>\n The Newhouse sale represented the fourth tranche of art to be auctioned from the publisher and Cond\u00e9 Nast chairman\u2019s collection since his death. The first three brought in a combined $415.8 million. After the latest tranche of artworks, the total value more than doubled, to just over $1 billion. Newhouse\u2019s widow, Victoria, told The New York Times<\/a> that she had decided to sell because she was moving to a smaller apartment. \u201cIt\u2019s an effort to simplify my life,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Her decision to edit her collection is also in keeping with her husband\u2019s well-documented practice of buying and selling. While some collectors, like Gund, took pride in the fact that they almost never sold their art, Newhouse frequently offloaded treasures to make room for new ones. He \u201csimply enjoyed the activity of falling in love with works of art and sought to repeat that impulsive act,\u201d the art historian Mark Rosenthal wrote in 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n Newhouse was drawn to big names like Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian and Jasper Johns, but he often eschewed bright colors and conventional beauty in favor of historical significance, according to experts. \u201cNone of these are pretty trophy works,\u201d said the art adviser David Norman, who did not work with the Newhouse family. \u201cThey are serious collectors\u2019 works, dense with meaning and art history.\u201d<\/p>\n