One Night, $1.1 Billion, and Nicole Kidman Staring Into a Golden Sculpture
Christie's just had the kind of evening that makes you want to buy a Brancusi. You can't, obviously. But still.
As CNN Style reported, there is a very specific kind of power move that only New York in May can pull off: gathering some of the wealthiest people on earth into a single room and watching $1.1 billion change hands in an evening. Christie's did exactly that, and it didn't even need the full night to make it interesting. The first $630 million was gone in 40 minutes.
There is a very specific kind of power move that only New York in May can pull off: gathering some of the wealthiest people on earth into a single room and watching $1.1 billion change hands in an evening. Christie's did exactly that this week, and it didn't even need the full night to make it interesting. The first $630 million was gone in 40 minutes.
The centerpiece of the whole extraordinary affair was a collection that felt almost novelistic in its provenance. Sixteen works from the estate of S.I. Newhouse — the late media titan who built Condé Nast into a cultural empire and whose name still ghosts the masthead of every magazine you've ever loved — came to auction in what Christie's billed as the fourth and perhaps most significant chapter of his collection's long, careful unraveling. Picasso. Mondrian. Matisse. Warhol. Rauschenberg. A lineup that reads less like a sale catalogue and more like the permanent collection of a very private, very tasteful museum.
But the night's true theatrical centerpiece was a golden Brancusi bust called "Danaïde" — a luminous, modernist rendering of a figure from Greek myth condemned to carry water in a sieve for eternity. Brancusi understood something about longing and futility that the auction market, it turns out, deeply relates to.
Christie's, apparently feeling that a hundred-million-dollar sculpture deserved something beyond the usual press release, recruited Nicole Kidman to commune with it on camera. The resulting short film — referencing a 1930s Man Ray portrait of surrealist Lee Miller — showed Kidman in a kind of dreamlike encounter with the piece. It did not go as viral as her now-legendary AMC ad (nothing will), but it confirmed what we already suspected: Nicole Kidman will commit fully to any creative brief handed to her, which is honestly a quality we should all aspire to.
"Danaïde" hammered at $107.6 million with fees, obliterating Brancusi's previous auction record almost from the first bid. The room, apparently, did not need much time to make up its mind.
Neither did it hesitate over Jackson Pollock. A monumental drip painting — one of the rare few of its scale still in private hands — climbed to $181.2 million, more than tripling Pollock's previous auction record from 2021 and landing as the night's single highest-grossing lot. The crowd applauded. As one does.
The Newhouse collection's journey to the block was guided in large part by Tobias Meyer, the former auctioneer turned art advisor who shepherded the family's wishes through the process. And according to the New York Times, Victoria Newhouse — S.I.'s widow — had a fairly simple explanation for why the time had come: she's downsizing. "I'm not getting any younger," she told the paper, "and I feel the time has come to start downsizing. It's an effort to simplify my life." There is something both entirely relatable and completely surreal about selling a $107 million Brancusi in the name of simplification. We respect it.
The Newhouse tranche sits in remarkable company. Only the late Paul Allen's collection has generated more at auction from a single owner — his two-part 2022 sale brought in a staggering $1.5 billion on the first night alone. Newhouse's works have come to market in more measured installments, including the 2019 sale of Jeff Koons' "Rabbit" for $91 million, a moment that briefly made Koons the most expensive living artist by public auction record.
Elsewhere in the evening, three works from Agnes Gund's collection brought their own headlines. A Mark Rothko set a new record for the artist at $98.4 million — color field painting as monument, as it should be. And Sotheby's, not to be entirely upstaged, offered $166.3 million in works from the late art dealer Robert Mnuchin the previous week, because May in New York is simply not for the faint of wallet.
The art market's top tier has been working very hard to remind itself — and everyone else — that it is still the art market's top tier. After a run of uncertain sales and global economic volatility, both Christie's and Sotheby's have strategically courted these rare, single-owner collections: estates and legacies of people who spent decades accumulating works that are, by definition, becoming harder to find. It is a sound strategy. One that requires, at its core, roughly 30 people on earth with the means and appetite to carry the room.
Twenty thousand visitors came to Christie's before the sale to see the works in person — to stand in front of a Pollock that would, within days, be gone behind a private door somewhere. There is something in that number worth sitting with. The art was always going to sell. But the looking — that was free, and that was its own kind of extraordinary.
Nicole Kidman said, in a different context, that we go to certain places for magic. Monday night in New York, the magic had a gavel and a very good lighting rig.
TheMag4 covers art, culture, and the life well-lived across Southern California.