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Christie’s Locks in the $450 Million S.I. Newhouse Collection

The upcoming single-owner sale of 16 masterworks from Newhouse's collection will be led by iconic museum-scale works by Pollock and Brancusi, each with an estimate in the $100 million range.

It’s official: after Katya Kazakyna at Artnet News leaked the news, Christie's has confirmed it has secured 16 trophy pieces from the collection of media mogul and power collector S.I. Newhouse, to be offered in a separate single-owner sale, Masterpieces: The Private Collection of S.I. Newhouse, that will open and headline the house’s May Marquee auctions alongside other notable collections—including a combined $80 million worth of works from Agnes Gund’s collection.

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The S.I. Newhouse selection will be led by a seminal work by Jackson Pollock: the monumental Number 7A (1948). Measuring 131.5 inches (334 cm) wide—the largest drip painting by Pollock remaining in private hands—the work presents a dynamic composition executed in his signature dripping technique, not unlike the example hanging at the Museum of Modern Art. It comes to auction with an estimate in the $100 million range; no equivalent work has appeared at auction in recent years. (Pollock’s current auction record was set at Christie’s in 2013, when Number 19 (1948), enamel on canvas, sold for $58.4 million.)

Boasting a remarkable provenance beginning with the photographer Herbert Matter, to whom Pollock gifted the work, and extending to collectors Kimiko and John Powers, the painting has been out of public view for nearly half a century, since its last showing at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1977. While the masculine myth surrounding many Postwar male painters has faded, the Pollock legend may still trigger strong market interest. In November 2024, a smaller but iconic painting sold at Phillips for $15.3 million, although the auction house later filed a lawsuit against film........

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