It’s now clear that they were competing for Newhouse. Tobias Meyer, who has overseen a series of sales of the publishing magnate’s collection since his death in 2017, has netted the estate the better part of a billion dollars during the past decade. In 2018, Sotheby’s sold $300 million worth of art from the collection. Privately, that same year, the family sold Andy Warhol’s Orange Marilyn, from 1964, to Ken Griffin for $235 million. The next year, Christie’s held a $215 million sale that included Jeff Koons’s Rabbit, from 1986, which made $90 million. In 2023, another group of 16 works—including an early Willem de Kooning and a Francis Bacon self-portrait—netted almost $178 million. It seemed like the Newhouse collection was petering out, but the market was also slowing.

More recently, Meyer saw what Sotheby’s had been able to do with the Leonard Lauder collection. (Who could have missed it?) Cannily timing the market, he set his sights on this spring to sell more of Newhouse’s collection. Clearly, he had been waiting patiently for the mood of the world’s billionaires to turn toward spending on art, as it has—and for historical works to move back into the center of the conversation. In the end, both houses came in with estimates so close to each other that they were nearly indistinguishable. Whether the choice of Christie’s came down to Meyer’s previous working relationship with the house or slightly higher estimates for the very top lots, I can’t tell. But it is clear that Christie’s didn’t get the consignment solely based on its track record with Newhouse. It’s also clear that whatever’s going on in the art market at this somewhat fraught historical moment, Meyer is having a great time with this sale. (Read Nate Freeman’s excellent Vanity Fair article to get a taste.) And why not? He dropped half a billion dollars’ worth of art into the middle of a market deeply in need of high-quality historical works with a marquee provenance. That $462 million represents the bulk of the difference between last May’s $1.15 billion presale estimate and this May’s $1.86 billion presale estimate for all of the auction houses combined.

In 2019, the last time he had a chance to present works from the Newhouse collection, Meyer came to Christie’s with a vision: He wanted the Koons rabbit to evoke the final scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Christie’s designers made it happen, and the result spoke for itself. This time around, Meyer’s cinematic reference point for staging Constantin Brancusi’s Danaïde, from 1913, was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

When you go to Christie’s, you’ll see the small bronze with gold leaf sculpture, estimated at a cool $100 million, sitting in the middle of a velvet walled cylinder, surrounded by a velvet railing. Seeing pictures of the presentation, I assumed that the railing was an Easter egg drawn from Francis Bacon’s work. As it turns out, the inspiration was a Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam. The idea is to give viewers a tactile, almost haptic experience while gazing at an object beyond their grasp, literally and figuratively. Seeing the art in this setting won’t give you a sense of what it was like to live with works of this caliber. Newhouse didn’t have a dramatically lit chamber to display his Brancusi; it sat on a coffee table. Collectors have a different, more intimate relationship with their art—Newhouse probably more than most—but an auction house exhibition is about showing the works in the least personal, most awe-inducing way. You have to justify the $100 million ask. That’s a lot of money to put into an estimate, but in the case of Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A, 1948, which Christie’s had pushed out an exterior wall to present in its main gallery, that number may be intentionally suppressed. As the auction house learned just a few years ago, when it put a $200 million estimate on Warhol’s Sage Blue Marilyn only to sell the piece for $195 million, those numbers should entice bidding, not put off potential acquirers. If you can afford a $100 million painting, it’s likely that you can also stretch to $200 million, but there’s a huge psychological threshold many bidders just won’t cross unless they’re carried away in an auction setting. So there’s no good reason to put a higher estimate on the work, even though Meyer himself sold a Pollock privately 20 years ago for $140 million. (And another one traded privately for $200 million a decade ago.) Markets fluctuate, and not all Pollocks are equal. This work is similar to another black drip painting on raw canvas—part of a recognized series Pollock made with enamel paint—that Newhouse also previously owned. That one was bought by the Macklowes and made $61 million in their 2021 sale.