The Pollock Record שיא פולוק

Last week was one of the historic weeks in the world of the art market. But the sale is not the big story here.

🔨 Number 7A by Jackson Pollock sold at the auction house Christie's for $181.2 million!!! A new record, after Pollock's previous record stood at $61.2 million in 2021. But the story is not the painting. The story is what the sale reveals about the way a great collection is built.

Pollock is the American painter who invented drip painting: painting through movement, pouring paint directly onto the canvas laid on the floor. He shifted the art world's center of gravity from Paris to New York. This painting, from 1948, is one of the peaks of his career.

But the real story is who sold it. Sy Newhouse ran Conde Nast for 40 years and built his art collection on one simple principle: do not buy a lot, buy the best version of every artist he chose, and then do not be afraid to sell it when a better version turns up. He worked closely with the dealer Tobias Meyer for years on end to shape and edit the collection, and together with his wife Victoria invested over $700 million. Since his death, Meyer has been bringing the collection to sale in calculated waves, carefully, so the market is not flooded with iconic works all at once. After this sale, 47 works from the Newhouse collection have brought in over a billion dollars. For comparison: the Paul Allen collection, the largest ever sold, crossed the 1.6 billion mark in 2021. From 155 works. Newhouse: a third of the works, two thirds of the price. That is the result of high quality curatorial work.

christies.com: Jackson Pollock, Number 7A