S.I. Newhouse Collected Magazines — and His Trove of the ‘First and Best’ of Modern Art Is Expected To Fetch a Fortune

The auctioning at Christie’s on Monday of 16 works from the collection of S.I Newhouse Jr. for an expected total of some $460 million amounts to posthumous vindication of the enigmatic press baron’s taste for the crème de la crème of modern art. At a moment when New York City can somehow boast of shows by Marcel Duchamp and Raphael, this blaze of brilliance can’t help but prompt a smidgen of regret that this collection could disappear from view.Christie’s global chairman of 20th and 21st century art, Max Carter, calls the Newhouse horde “first and best of everything.” Newhouse’s widow, Victoria, tells the Times that she is putting the art to auction because the “time has come to start downsizing. It’s an effort to simplify my life.” Also downsizing is Condé Nast, the magazine empire that one chronicler reckons was the “media dynasty that reshaped America.” Newhouse was never the biggest personality in the room, but he was the sun around which his glamorous galaxy of editors spun. Newhouse inherited Condé Nast from his father Samuel, who charted a course to Park Avenue grandeur from Lower East Side tenements. The Newhouse’s still own Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, but have already parted with several tranches of art that have gone for some $415 million prior to this week’s auction. The estate privately sold Andy Warhol’s “Orange Marilyn” from 1964, to the Citadel founder Ken Griffin for $235 million. ‘Number 7a, 1948’ by Jackson Pollock. Via Christie’sThe collection’s centerpiece is Jackson Pollack’s “Number 7A, 1948.” It is expected to fetch more than $100 million. When Pollock was 36 he painted the work in his barn near East Hampton. This critic sees something like a poured and drizzled tattoo or DNA filament exploded on the skin’s surface. Red pinpricks and wet grooves compete for attention with spidery lines. The painting has been unseen since it hung at the Whitney half a century ago. Newhouse hung it in his dining room.Displayed at Christie’s as an idol of old was “Danaïde,” a golden head sculpted by Constance Brancusi in 1913 also pegged at $100 million. The title is Greek but the piece’s style is Egyptian, delivering a modernist Ramses or Nefertiti for the early 20th century. The Romanian sculptor once declared that “For art to be free and universal, you must create like a god, command like a king and execute like a slave.” Pieces by Pablo Picasso offer a view into Cubism at an embryonic stage. “Homme à la guitare,” expected to cost some $50 million, was once owned by Gertrude Stein. Even more memorable is “Tête de femme,” a study for the famed “Les demoiselles d’Avignon” that hangs in savage splendor a mere five minute walk away at the Museum of Modern Art. A lush Matisse, “Robe noire et robe violette,” is reckoned at between $40 million and $50 million.‘Tête de femme’ by Pablo Picasso, 1913. Via Christie’sAnother compelling cranium is a painting by Lucien Freud of a life mask of the poet William Blake. That visage, startlingly detailed, floats against a pitch black background that is as chilling a rendering of the afterlife as can be imagined. Andy Warhol’s “Do It Yourself (Violin),” at $30 million, is a more cheerful and gorgeously incomplete portrait of a guitar — a call back to Picasso — against a paint by numbers grid that telegraphs a Pop puckishness. “Portrait of Madame K” by Juan Miro remakes the ancient genre for the Surrealists and could reach $50 million. Christie’s hopes that an arresting Mondrian, with an orange square that resembles a segment of a chessboard amplified by acid, achieves a bid in the same stratosphere. “Gray Target,” by Jasper Johns, is an exploration of that shade as both color and idea, akin to what the poet Andrew Marvell describes as a “green thought in a green shade.”‘Study for Portrait I (after the Life Mask of William Blake)’, by Francis Bacon, 1955. Via Christie’sThe most striking work seen by this critic at Christie’s was not from Newhouse’s collection but instead from another one at auction this week, that of Agnes Gund’s. She bought Mark Rothko’s “No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe)” directly from the artist during a visit to his studio in 1967. Expected to reach $80 million at the auctioneers gavel, the verdant background is slashed by a line of red that looks like a wound or a warning. No single work in the Newhouse lot is expected to match the $236 million paid at Sotheby’s last year by an undisclosed bidder for Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer,” the record for a work of modern art. The record for any work at auction is $450 million for a painting purportedly by Leonardo da Vinci. It could be that for all the thrill of abstraction, it is portraits — faces — that command the ultimate premiums.

S.I. Newhouse Collected Magazines — and His Trove of the ‘First and Best’ of Modern Art Is Expected To Fetch a Fortune

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