The S.I. Newhouse collection managed to bring a whopping $630.8 million as part of a Christie’s double-header this week.
The 16 lots came from the collection of late media giant S.I. Newhouse Jr., the former head of Condé Nast. The auction lot featured blue-chip names like Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Pablo Picasso. The works went up on the block as part of a double-header sale that kicked off Christie’s marquee evening sales for the season.
The collection ended up fetching $630.8 million, leading the cumulative total from the double-header to a whopping $1.1 billion. With 100% sales, the Newhouse collection averaged almost $40 million per work. The star of the show was undoubtedly Jackson Pollock‘s Number 7A, 1948 (1948) which caused a fierce bidding war and ended up selling for $181.2 million. This shattered Pollock’s previous record, set for $61 million in 2021, by a long mile.
It was also an eventful evening for Constantin Brâncuși, whose Danaïde (1913) was sold for $82 million and set a new record for the artist, breaking past the previous numnber of $71.2 million. The other works did not create any records for their respective artists, but still fetched top dollars. This included Picasso’s painting Tête de femme, which sold for $14.4 million, and another sculpture, which sold for $48.4 million.
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The S.I. Newhouse sale was followed up by a 20th Century sale, which featured some 60 lots and brought the cumulative sales of the night to $1.1 billion. The Newhouse collection has so far fetched $1.05 billion, making it the second-most valuable collection in recent times after Paul Allen’s (which fetched $1.7 billion in 2022).
