It is a promotional video unlike the usually discreet art market fare . Released on YouTube, it borrows the codes of a big-budget action film, punctuated by dramatic sound effects. Over some forty seconds, Christie’s runs backward through key milestones in the history of modern sculpture, according to the auction house, from a 2026 exhibition by the American artist Rashid Johnson at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to 1913. That, precisely, is where the auction house is heading.
In that year, the French sculptor of Romanian origin Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) created Danaïde: atop a slightly tilted neck rests an egg-shaped female head, hyper-stylized and radically simplified. Only vast eyebrows, a small pointed nose and a tiny mischievous mouth emerge. A work of striking three-dimensional radicality. In this case, unusually, it is a bronze with a black patina subtly overlaid with gold leaf. Brilliant, but not excessively so. The Centre Pompidou owns a similar example of what is undoubtedly a work of major importance.
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But would Brancusi have appreciated such a blockbuster-style staging? Not certain. It is worth recalling, however, that the sculptor himself photographed and filmed his works for promotional purposes. Christie’s grandiloquent communication reflects a broader shift: auction houses now seek spectacle, conceiving their activity as something to be widely broadcast on social media. Above all, this is one of the star lots of the season in the modern and contemporary sales in New York. Danaïde is estimated at around $100 million. It belongs to a group of 16 works, valued at a total of $450 million, from the collection of one of America’s media emperors, S. I. Newhouse Jr. (1927–2017), co-owner of Condé Nast (Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker…).
Newhouse was also regarded as a legendary American collector, though an atypical one. Deeply private and resolutely anti-social, he did not make the large-scale donations to major museums so common in the United States. For the press magnate, art was a highly personal, intensely studied pursuit, confined to his inner circle. “In his library, if you opened a book on an artist, it was annotated,” recalls Tobias Meyer, Newhouse’s trusted adviser on art. “He began by collecting contemporary art. It was the artist Barnett Newman who opened his eyes to modern art.”
Tobias Meyer
Since the collector’s death, Meyer—formerly a star auctioneer at Sotheby’s, now a private dealer—has overseen the dispersal of the works.
A first sale of 11 lots in 2019 included a sculpture by Jeff Koons, the celebrated Rabbit, a childlike balloon rendered in polished steel. It fetched $91.1 million, then a record for a sculpture by a living artist. In May 2023, another 16 works from the Newhouse collection brought $43.5 million. There is also talk of a discreet acquisition by the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin, for over $200 million, of a major 1960s “Shot Marilyn” by Andy Warhol.
Lauder sale
Regarding the May 18, 2026 sale, Meyer explains: “Victoria, SI’s widow, wishes to move to a smaller space. I selected works that currently enjoy strong recognition. There are many more in the collection. I chose Christie’s not because of the estimates—they were the same as Sotheby’s—but because Christie’s offered me more attractive financial terms. I decided it was the right moment to sell: the climate is favorable. I saw the excellent results of the Leonard A. Lauder sale (Editor’s note: on November 18, 2025, 24 lots from an heir to the cosmetics empire brought $527.5 million at Sotheby’s).”
Contemporary first
Newhouse began his collecting with Pollock, de Kooning and Rauschenberg before turning to Brancusi, Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne. He acquired Danaïde at auction in New York in 2002 for €19.7 million, then the highest price ever paid for a sculpture at auction. It cemented his reputation for audacity, pushing him toward acquisitions at colossal levels.
Today Christie’s shows similar boldness in its estimate: the highest price ever achieved for a Brancusi stands, according to Artprice, at $71 million, set in 2018 for a bronze titled “La Jeune Fille sophistiquée.”
$100 million
In contemporary art, the star lot is an early “dripping” painting by the icon of American abstraction, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). The technique involves flinging polychrome paint onto the canvas, producing a web of abstract dots that coalesce into a striking harmony. A historic gesture, somewhere between trance and choreography, invented just after the war and marking a break with European art.
The work, “Number 7A, 1948,” is again estimated at around $100 million—a sum almost “reasonable” given private transactions involving the mythic American painter. Newhouse himself quietly sold a dripping from the same year in 1991 to DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen, who resold it in 2006 for $136 million. “There is no Pollock of this quality on the market,” Meyer concludes.
Robert Mnuchin
At the same time, during the spring 2026 modern and contemporary sales in New York, 11 works from the collection of the art dealer Robert Mnuchin (1933–2025) are to be sold at Sotheby’s on May 14, with a total estimate of $125 million. By coincidence, it was Mnuchin who, in 2019, orchestrated the headline-making purchase of Koons’s record-setting Rabbit from the Newhouse collection on behalf of the seasoned collector and hedge-fund owner Steven A. Cohen.
two lives
In fact, Mnuchin had two lives. In the first, he spent 33 years at Goldman Sachs, eventually becoming a partner. He was already a collector, the son of a collector whose holdings included works by the Pop artists Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. (As a side note, his son Steven Mnuchin, also a collector, served as US Treasury Secretary under President Trump’s first term.)
american abstraction
At 57, Robert Mnuchin retired from banking and devoted himself fully to art, opening a gallery and later taking on partners, including Dominique Lévy, now associated with Brett Gorvy and Amalia Dayan in the Levy Gorvy Dayan gallery in New York. He built his reputation on major American abstract painters. “The works in the sale come from his private collection. They were mainly displayed in his Connecticut home,” notes Grégoire Billault, chairman of contemporary art at Sotheby’s.
vibrant rothko
The most anticipated painting is a 1957 canvas by Mark Rothko (1903–1970), in shades of red, brown and black. It featured in the 2024 Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in what was arguably the most moving room of the exhibition, devoted to the slowly darkening canvases. Mnuchin acquired it in 2003 for $6.7 million. Sotheby’s now offers it with an estimate of $70 million. According to market sources, paintings by the master of abstraction have recently sold privately for up to $190 million, which would correspond to the artist’s record.
peter brant
“Bob was a purist in art, an honest and straightforward man. I did many transactions with him over the years,” says Peter Brant, a collector known for his exceptional holdings of Basquiat and Warhol. “In his later years he regretted the lack of knowledge among buyers, their focus on the market rather than art history.” He adds: “Bob had a major influence on Jeff Koons’s secondary market, notably through the exhibition he devoted to him in 2004.”
jeff koons
The catalogue includes a notable Koons sculpture: a polished-steel bust of Louis XIV, dated 1986. The artist plays on the contrast between the ultra-contemporary, icy material and a subject emblematic of the magnificence of French decorative arts. Produced in an edition of three, with two examples in American museum collections and another in the Greek collection of Dakis Joannou, this work appears at auction for the third time, offering a clear view of Koons’s price trajectory. It sold for $210,000 in 1994, then for $10.8 million when acquired by Mnuchin in 2015. Today, estimates are more cautious, at around $7 million.
green indicators
Finally, on the pressing question of the art market in today’s turbulent climate, Billault remains optimistic: “In New York, on April 22, the sale of the French decorative arts collection of the Gunzburgs, estimated at $28 million, reached $96 million. The modern and contemporary sales in London in March went very well.” The Newhouse collection at Christie’s and the Mnuchin collection at Sotheby’s have both been guaranteed. Despite a politically fractured world and economic uncertainty, all indicators are green at the very top end of the 20th-century market.
(1) A financial guarantee ensuring that the seller receives a pre-agreed sum regardless of the outcome of the auction.
