In a rather peculiar blunt rotation, Jackson Pollock, Constantin Brancusi, and Hollywood star Nicole Kidman were all part of a record-setting $1 billion evening sale at Christie’s on Monday, May 18.
Pollock’s 10-foot-long drip painting “Number 7A, 1948,” shattered records for work by the late artist, selling for $181.2 million. The superlative sale nearly tripled the artist’s previous auction record of $61.2 million for the sale of “Number 17, 1951” in 2021.
In the same sale, Brancusi’s cast-bronze bust “Danaïde” (c. 1913) went for $107.6 million, becoming the second most expensive sculpture ever sold after Alberto Giacometti’s “L’Homme au Doigt” (1947) fetched $141.2 million in 2015.
In the weeks before the sale, Christie’s hyped up the collection in a promotional video featuring an entranced Kidman dancing around the Brancusi — a gold-leafed bust inspired by a young art student the Romanian sculptor had met in Paris — to the tune of David Bowie’s “Golden Years.”
Both pieces belonged to magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse, who died at age 89 in 2017. They anchored a selection of 16 masterpieces from the billionaire’s collection featuring artists such as Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Jasper Johns.
During a subsequent Monday evening auction of 20th-century works at Christie’s, Mark Rothko’s “No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe)” (1964), from the late philanthropist Agnes Gund’s personal collection, came under the hammer at $98.4 million with fees, surpassing the artist’s previous sale record of $86.9 million in 2012.
Christie’s did not name the collectors who purchased the Pollock and Brancusi.
Factoring in prior auctions from 2018 through 2023, Newhouse’s overall collection surpassed $1.05 billion in sales this week, becoming the second most valuable private collection after that of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, according to Christie’s.
