Major works from media mogul S.I. Newhouse's estate are poised to smash records at Christie's in May. The tranche of 35 to 40 works includes paintings by Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns, as well as a Constantin Brancusi sculpture, and is valued it at a whopping $450 million.
That's a lot of money, but far from the most expensive handbag ever sold. In July, Hermès' original Birkin bag - worn by Jane Birkin, herself - sold for $10.1 million, becoming the most valuable handbag ever sold at auction. The iconic purse went to a private collector in Japan, who phoned in and won a 10-minute bidding war. While items selling for millions, or even six figures, may be rare, the luxury resale market is booming.
In all 16 artists' secondary market records were broken over the four-session sale, which began mid-afternoon and went until the late evening. Heffel vice-president Robert Heffel, who shared auctioneering duties with his brother and the auction house's president David Heffel, allowed himself mere minutes between the latter sessions. It was time well spent, with Heffel taking in over C$31m ($22.1m).
Báez's monumental 2021 painting Untitled (Colonization in America, Visual History Wall Map, Prepared by Civic Education Service) sold for $1,111,250, setting a new record for the Dominican-born artist whose work interrogates colonial histories through layers of archival maps, Caribbean symbolism, and swirly swaths of paint-in this case, densely rendered feathers. Brown's After the Alcatraz Swim #2 achieved $596,900, a benchmark for the Bay Area Figurative artist whose psychologically charged self-portrait draws from a near-fatal 1975 swim in San Francisco Bay.
Though last night's 20th Century Evening Sale at Christie's, the first of New York City's fall marquee week, was by all accounts a successful auction, there were not many surprises. It was not exactly shocking that the night's top lot, a desirable flame-colored Rothko from the Weis Collection, went for $62 million. Few eyebrows were raised when Matisse's "Figure et bouquet (Tete ocre)," already requested by MoMA for a show next year, climbed from $10 million to $13 million in seconds, eventually fetching three times that.
One such item just set a new record for Star Wars props sold at auction. It's not just any item, either: It's one of the lightsabers wielded by Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy. According to auction house Propstore, this lightsaber can be seen in both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and the buyer paid a record-setting $3,654,000 for it.
