Newhouse Night, or: What $181 Million Says That the Rest of the Room Does Not

There is a particular hush that settles over Rockefeller Center on the evening of a single-owner sale, and it is not the hush of suspense. It is the hush of a settled question. The collection has been catalogued for months; the estimates have been workshopped through three drafts and a lawyer; the guarantees, where guarantees exist, have already been written into ledgers that nobody outside the building will ever see. By the time the auctioneer steps to the rostrum, the only thing genuinely unknown is whether the room will applaud politely or whether it will, just once, gasp.

On the evening of Monday, 18 May, the room gasped on lot four.

The Pollock

Jackson Pollock's Number 7A, 1948, an oil-on-canvas of comparatively modest dimensions and entirely immodest provenance, had been estimated at thirty to fifty million dollars. This is the sort of estimate that auction houses publish in order to be wrong about, in the direction of their choosing. Christie's chose the direction. The picture hammered at $181,200,000, which is — if anyone in the room was still keeping score, and of course they were — three-point-six times the high estimate, or, if you prefer your multiples expressed in the way the room was actually thinking about them, two hundred and sixty-two per cent over high.

It is the kind of result one writes about for some time. It is also, and this is the part that nobody will say out loud, the kind of result that makes the rest of an evening's sale technically a footnote. Strip the Pollock out of the night and Christie's grossed $342 million on the remaining fourteen lots, which is still a respectable evening's work in anybody's bookkeeping. With the Pollock, the total was $523.2 million, all of it on a single-owner card and not one buy-in to spoil the column.

What the room had been whispering

The chatter through April — and there is always chatter through April — was that the Newhouse pictures had already been picked over. That the masterworks had gone to MoMA by the back door, or to the estate in chunks Christie's was too discreet to name, and that what the public would get was the second tier. Si Newhouse, the chatter ran, kept the very best for the institutions; the sale would be a long evening of decent ten-million-dollar pictures earning decent ten-million-dollar prices, and we could all be home by ten-thirty.

We were not home by ten-thirty. The second tier, it turned out, included a Pollock the published record had not seen since the early 1990s; a Miró portrait that hammered at $53.5 million against a high estimate of thirty-five; and a smaller Picasso Tête de femme with a six-to-eight estimate that closed at $14.4 million — an over-high multiple of 1.8×, which is to say roughly the same multiple one earns on a long-held S&P position, except realised in twelve seconds of bidding rather than a decade of patience.

Three lots that didn't read the script

And yet. In the middle of the sale, when the room had settled into the comfortable rhythm of seven-figure increments and inaudible bids from phone-attended specialists in the white booths along the wall, three lots declined to perform. Jasper Johns's Figure 2 — estimated at ten-to-fifteen — hammered at $8.9 million, which is to say beneath the low and approximately one-third the way to the high. Roy Lichtenstein's Voodoo Lily, perfectly nice for what it was, closed at $5.6 million on a six-to-eight, also under. And a second Johns, Alley Oop, also estimated six-to-eight, hammered $5.8 million.

Two Johns and a Lichtenstein closed below low estimate. This is a sentence that, written a decade ago, would have been received as a clerical error. Tonight it was simply the truth of an evening in which a Pollock did everything, and everything else was asked to do correspondingly less.

The math, briefly

Of the fifteen lots, three landed above high estimate, three below low, and nine within the published range — a distribution as close to the controlled experiment a sale ever produces. The mean variance from the estimate midpoint, weighted by lot, was a remarkably tame seven per cent, save for the Pollock outlier whose effect can be felt without disturbing the rest of the curve. If you wanted, you could read the evening as a faithful reflection of the published estimates — a 100% sell-through, modest dispersion — with one cosmic exception. You could also read it as the market re-pricing the very top of the Pollock register in a single evening. Both readings are correct. Only one of them goes in tomorrow's newspaper.

The kicker

Si Newhouse — who, as it happens, gave the room a great deal more than he kept — does not require a coronation. He has, by every account that matters, had several. The Pollock supplied one anyway. Whether the under-low Johnses and the perfectly competent Lichtenstein were the price of the coronation, or whether they were simply three pictures the market had quietly decided to re-rank while we were all watching the headline lot, is the kind of question that will be answered by the next two Johns sales and not by this one.

For now, $523.2 million, one hundred per cent sold, and an evening that will be remembered for one lot — which is, when one thinks about it, the condition every single-owner sale aspires to and most fail to achieve. The Newhouse sale did not fail.