The big sale in London – which closed at more than £364.4 million across the three major theaters – had not yet ended when Christie’s and Sotheby’s announced the best consignments expected to generate momentum in New York in May this year. Like Katya Kazakina It was first reported in Artnet NewsChristie’s has acquired a prized new collection of works from media mogul S.I. Newhouse for this spring. Among the multi-million-dollar pieces of memorabilia from the collection that will be sold at the first auction are works of art by prominent artists of the era such as Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns, as well as a museum-grade sculpture by Constantin Brancusi. The group is expected to generate a total of $450 million at the minimum.
Since S. I. Newhouse’s death in 2017, works from his collection have traded hands at public sales and private transactions, often with the help of Tobias Mayer, the former Sotheby’s auction star who long served as a trusted art advisor. The first glimpse of the collection at auction came during Sotheby’s 2018 Newhouse sale, which grossed nearly $300 million across several auctions led by masterpieces like Roy Lichtenstein’s $46 million Nude with joyful painting (1994), $25.8 million for Jeff Koons Balloon flower (purple) and $25.8 million Francis Bacon, among others.
Christie’s has since handled several additional auctions of the SI Newhouse estate, the most famous of which is the mirror-polished Jeff Koons auction. rabbit (1986), which sold for $91 million in 2019, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold at auction. The latest group of 16 works from the collection sold by Christie’s fetched $178 million at a custom auction in May 2023, led by collector Willem de Kooning Orestes (1947), which grossed $31 million, alongside Francis Bacon, which grossed $34.62 million, and Ed Ruscha, which grossed $22.3 million.
According to Kazakina, a $100 million Pollock drip painting will be displayed on the block in May of this year. No. 7 (1948), and a rare bronze head covered with gold leaf, by Brancusi Danaid (1913), also estimated at approximately $100 million. While Christie’s has not widely confirmed these estimates, both prices will be well above the respective artists’ auction records. Bullock’s current high is $61.2 million, which he has achieved Issue 17, 1951 At Christie’s Macklowe Collection auction in November 2021. Brancusi’s record was set in May 2018 when La Jeune fille Sophistikée (Photo by Nancy Cunard) (1928/1932) sold at Christie’s for $71.2 million including fees, surpassing the artist’s previous record of $57.4 million set the previous year.
Newhouse is often described as a conservative collector, and his fortunes have derived primarily from Advance Publications, the private media empire that has been run by the family for generations. Its portfolio includes Condé Nast and several regional newspapers along with cable and digital platforms. Over several decades, the family quietly amassed one of the finest private art collections in the United States. The Newhouse holdings became legendary under the leadership of S. I. Newhouse Jr., who aggressively built the collection from the 1960s onward, focusing on the art of his time and eventually assembling one of the most important private collections of postwar art.
More recently, in December, Sotheby’s included two more masterpieces owned by Newhouse in its blockbuster, unsold exhibition “Icons: Return to Madison” at its new headquarters: Warhol He shot an orange marlinwhich Newhouse acquired for $17.3 million in 1998 at Sotheby’s, and Jasper Johns. False start (1959), which he purchased in 1988 for $17 million, also at Sotheby’s. As Nate Freeman reported in Vanity Fair in 2022, Newhouse sold out He shot an orange marlin To Griffin in a private deal arranged by Tobias Mayer for approximately $240 million. In a 1998 BBC article, Mayer – then a young specialist at Sotheby’s – described the work as a “wise buy”, a judgment that seems almost undervalued today given the painting’s trajectory on the market.
While Christie’s takes charge of another sale of art from the Newhouse collection, Sotheby’s is determined to maintain the momentum after its $1.173 billion big week in November and the additional £154 million it made last week in London – double last year’s total. The auction house announced Friday that it has acquired the collection of legendary dealer, art collector and former banker Robert E. Mnuchin, after his death in December at the age of 92, with the first group of 24 works heading to the stage in May with a total value exceeding $130 million.
The group is led by the massive and evocative Mark Rothko Brown and black in red (1957) with a high estimate of $100 million. An embodiment of the artist’s mastery of color—channeling spiritual intensity into luminous fields that transform painting into a kind of portal—the work was originally acquired circa 1957 by Joseph E. Seagram & Sons. Notably, its color palette anticipates the famous Seagram murals that Rothko would later create. Having remained in the Mnuchin collection for more than two decades, the painting has appeared in several major exhibitions, including the 1978-1979 traveling retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the “Rothko” at Tate London in 1987 and the recent Louis Vuitton Foundation exhibition in Paris. It is one of 15 huge canvases created by Rothko in 1957 measuring more than 90 inches, most of which are now in the collections of museums including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Panza Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Rothko will hold a dedicated evening auction in May in New York, where 11 works from the collection will be on display, with additional lots appearing in the Modern and Contemporary sales. Other highlights include artists whom Mnuchin has championed for decades, particularly from the generation of Abstract Expressionists he most admired. Among them is Willem de Kooning Untitled XLII (1983), whose squiggly lines of blue, red, pink and violet dance across a luminous white field. De Kooning was one of Mnuchin’s all-time favorites – “the Chairman of the Board,” as he used to call him. Long before he became a dealer, Mnuchin frequently visited the artist at his studio in New York. Later, through his gallery, he organized eight exhibitions dedicated to de Kooning, culminating in the ambitious “De Kooning: Five Decades” in 2019. Christie’s described this painting as the most important work from de Kooning’s last decade to appear since. Untitled IVwhich sold for more than $18.9 million at the Macklowe Collection auction in November 2021.
The collection also includes a large-scale example of Franz Kline’s black-and-white abstractions from the 1960s and Jeff Koons’ sculptural bust of Louis XIV (1986). Mnuchin was an early supporter of Koons, acquiring and promoting the artist’s work long before his market reached its current levels.
Mnuchin was an avid art collector, and shared his love of art with his wife, Adriana. When he decided to focus fully on the art world, he first founded L&M Arts in 1992 with Dominique Lévy, quickly establishing the gallery as a destination for museum-quality modern and post-war works. After L&M Arts closed in 2013, Mnuchin launched the Mnuchin Gallery on East 78th Street in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which has since become known for scholarly exhibitions dedicated to both traditional and underappreciated postwar artists. As Mnuchin told Marion Maneker Interview 2021“It took a lot of courage” to walk away from Goldman Sachs after three decades. But he wanted to see what he could achieve independently. Since museums rarely employ someone without a formal art background, he concluded that “the only alternative was to start my own gallery, which I did.” The gallery closed last February.
For Mnuchin and Adriana, collecting was “a passionate, almost obsessive way of life,” as their daughter Valerie Mnuchin later recalled. “They only bought what they loved,” she said. “It had to be a mutual and personal choice that stemmed from the desire to live with beauty and adventure.” “They sought out ‘A’ paintings – works that represented the artist’s finest achievement. Most of all, they simply could not stop desiring and loving the pictures.”
At a time when the art market is becoming increasingly eclectic, collections like those assembled by Mnuchin and Newhouse carry a special gravitational force, capable of changing the public perception of the market’s performance over the course of the year, as we have seen with November sales alone in 2025. If sales in the second half of the year are up 54%, fully reflecting a weak start to the year, it is largely due to the rise of high-value, single-owner art collections such as the $527.5 million Leonard Lauder Collection, which leads Once-in-a-lifetime masterpieces like the record-breaking $236.4 million Klimt collection A painting.
The momentum of today’s auction seasons is increasingly centered on these kinds of prized treasures that belong in museums, works amassed by a generation of collectors whose patience, conviction and wealth have allowed them to secure masterpieces that now rarely appear on the market and build collections that have no equal today.
However, for auction houses, securing such consignments is now as important as having a strategy to sell them: guarantees, third-party support, and carefully orchestrated deal structures have become central tools in the competition to win these collections, allowing Christie’s and Sotheby’s to de-risk major lots while ensuring the kind of high-value eyewear that can last an entire season. In today’s market, it’s not just these memorabilia consignments — but also the financial and marketing architecture that supports them and the stories behind them — that generate the excitement, confidence and momentum that the auction machine now relies on.
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