Two Legendary Collections Are Set to Dominate New York’s May Marquee Auctions

The London marquee sales—which closed at more than £364.4 million across the three major houses—were not even over yet when both Christie’s and Sotheby’s announced the top consignments expected to generate momentum in New York this May. As Katya Kazakina first reported in Artnet News, Christie’s secured a prized new trove of works from media mogul S. I. Newhouse for this spring. Among the multi-million-dollar trophy lots from the collection that will be auctioned in the first sale are masterworks by era-defining artists such as Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns, as well as a museum-grade sculpture by Constantin Brancusi. The group is expected to generate $450 million in total at the low end.

Since S. I. Newhouse’s passing in 2017, works from his collection have circulated both in public sales and private transactions, often with the help of Tobias Meyer, the former Sotheby’s star auctioneer who long served as his trusted art advisor. The first glimpse of the collection at auction came during Sotheby’s 2018 Newhouse sales, which generated roughly $300 million across several auctions led by masterpieces such as the $46 million Roy Lichtenstein Nude with Joyous Painting (1994), a $25.8 million Jeff Koons Balloon Flower (Magenta) and a $25.8 million Francis Bacon, among others.

Christie’s has since handled several additional auctions for the S. I. Newhouse estate, the most notorious being Jeff Koons’s mirror-polished Rabbit (1986), which sold for $91 million in 2019, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold at auction. The latest group of 16 works from the collection that Christie’s sold generated $178 million in a dedicated sale in May 2023, led by the expressive Willem de Kooning Orestes (1947), which achieved $31 million, alongside a $34.62 million Francis Bacon and the iconic $22.3 million Ed Ruscha.

According to Kazakina, on the block this May will be a $100 million Pollock drip painting, Number 7 (1948), and a rare gold-leaf-covered bronze head, Brancusi’s Danaïde (1913), also estimated around $100 million. While Christie’s has not broadly confirmed these estimates, both price tags would sit well above the respective artists’ auction records. Pollock’s current high stands at $61.2 million, achieved by Number 17, 1951 in the Macklowe Collection sale at Christie’s in November 2021. Brancusi’s record was set in May 2018 when La Jeune Fille Sophistiquée (Portrait de Nancy Cunard) (1928/1932) sold at Christie’s for $71.2 million with fees, surpassing the artist’s previous record of $57.4 million set the year before.

Often described as a discreet collector, Newhouse’s wealth derived primarily from Advance Publications, the privately held media empire the family has run for generations. Its portfolio includes Condé Nast and numerous regional newspapers alongside cable and digital platforms. Over several decades, the family quietly assembled one of the most formidable private art collections in the United States. The Newhouse holdings became legendary under the leadership of S. I. Newhouse Jr., who aggressively built the collection from the 1960s onward, focusing on the art of his own time and ultimately assembling one of the most important private collections of postwar art.

More recently, in December, Sotheby’s included two other masterpieces once owned by Newhouse in its blockbuster no-selling exhibition “Icons: Back to Madison” at its new headquarters: Warhol’s Shot Orange Marilyn, which Newhouse had acquired for $17.3 million in 1998 at Sotheby’s, and Jasper Johns’s False Start (1959), which he purchased in 1988 for $17 million, also at Sotheby’s. As Nate Freeman reported in Vanity Fair in 2022, Newhouse sold Shot Orange Marilyn to Griffin in a private transaction orchestrated by Tobias Meyer for roughly $240 million. In a 1998 BBC article, Meyer—then still a young Sotheby’s specialist—had called the work “a wise buy,” a judgment that seems almost understated today given the painting’s trajectory in the market.

As Christie’s takes charge of selling another group of masterworks from the Newhouse collection, Sotheby’s is determined to keep momentum going after its $1.173 billion marquee week in November and the additional £154 million achieved last week in London—double last year’s total. On Friday, the auction house announced that it had secured the collection of legendary dealer, collector and former banker Robert E. Mnuchin, following his passing in December at age 92, with a first group of 24 works heading to the rostrum in May with a combined estimate exceeding $130 million.

Mark Rothko abstract painting with three horizontal fields—a deep black band above a glowing red center and a dark lower block—floating against a saturated red ground." width="970" height="1303" data-caption='<span style="margin: 0px;padding: 0px">Mark Rothko&#8217;s <em>Brown and Blacks in Reds</em>, 1957, from the collection of Robert Mnuchin, will be offered this May at Sotheby&#8217;s with a $100 million high estimate.</span> <span class="lazyload media-credit">Courtesy of Sotheby&#039;s</span>'>

Leading the group is the monumental and evocative Mark Rothko Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957), with a high estimate of $100 million. Exemplifying the artist’s mastery of color—channeling spiritual intensity into luminous fields that transform painting into a kind of portal—the work was originally acquired around 1957 by Joseph E. Seagram & Sons. Notably, its palette anticipates the celebrated Seagram Murals that Rothko would later create. Having remained in Mnuchin’s collection for more than two decades, the painting has appeared in several major exhibitions, including the 1978-79 traveling retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, “Rothko” at Tate London in 1987 and the recent Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition in Paris. It is one of only 15 monumental canvases created by Rothko in 1957 measuring more than 90 inches, most of which now reside in museum collections including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Panza Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A.

The Rothko will anchor a dedicated evening auction this May in New York, where 11 works from the collection will be offered, with additional pieces appearing in the Modern and Contemporary sales. Other highlights include artists Mnuchin championed for decades, particularly from the generation of Abstract Expressionists he admired most. Among them is Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XLII (1983), whose sinuous blue, red, pink and violet lines dance across a luminous white field. De Kooning was one of Mnuchin’s absolute favorites—“the Chairman of the Board,” as he used to call him. Long before becoming a dealer, Mnuchin frequently visited the artist in his New York studio. Later, through his gallery, he organized eight exhibitions dedicated to de Kooning, culminating in the ambitious “de Kooning: Five Decades” in 2019. Christie’s described this painting as the most significant work from de Kooning’s final decade to appear since Untitled IV, which sold for more than $18.9 million in the Macklowe Collection sale in November 2021.

The group also includes a monumental example of Franz Kline’s black-and-white abstractions from the 1960s and a sculptural Jeff Koons bust of Louis XIV (1986). Mnuchin was among Koons’s earliest supporters, acquiring and promoting the artist’s work long before his market reached its current heights.

A passionate collector, Mnuchin shared his devotion to art with his wife Adriana. When he decided to pivot fully into the art world, he first founded L&M Arts in 1992 together with Dominique Lévy, quickly establishing the gallery as a destination for museum-quality modern and postwar works. After L&M Arts closed in 2013, Mnuchin launched Mnuchin Gallery on East 78th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which has since become known for scholarly exhibitions dedicated to both canonical and underappreciated postwar artists. As Mnuchin told Marion Maneker in a 2021 interview, it “took a lot of courage” to step away from Goldman Sachs after three decades. But he wanted to see what he could accomplish independently. Since museums would rarely hire someone without a formal art background, he concluded that “the only alternative was to start my own gallery, which is what I did.” The gallery closed last February.

For Mnuchin and Adriana, collecting was a “passionate and almost obsessive way of life,” as their daughter Valerie Mnuchin later recalled. “They only bought what they both loved. It had to be a mutual and personal choice that came from wanting to live with beauty and adventure,” she said. “They sought to acquire ‘A’ paintings—works that represented the finest achievement by the artist. Most of all, they simply couldn’t stop wanting and adoring pictures.”

At a moment when the art market has become increasingly selective, collections like those assembled by Mnuchin and Newhouse carry a particular gravitational force, capable of shifting the overall perception of year-long market performance, as we saw with the November sales alone in 2025. If in the second half of the year sales surged 54 percent, completely reversing the weaker start of the year, it was largely due to the rise in high-value, single-owner art collections such as the $527.5 million Leonard A. Lauder collection, led by once-in-a-lifetime masterpieces like its record-breaking $236.4 million Klimt Portrait.

The momentum of today’s auction seasons is increasingly built around precisely these kinds of museum-grade troves—works assembled by a generation of collectors whose patience, conviction and wealth allowed them to secure masterpieces that now rarely appear on the market and to build collections with few parallels today.

Yet for the auction houses, securing such consignments is now as important as having a strategy to sell them: guarantees, third-party backing and carefully orchestrated deal structures have become central tools in the competition to win these collections, allowing Christie’s and Sotheby’s to de-risk headline lots while ensuring the kind of high-value spectacles that can anchor an entire season. In today’s market, it is not only these trophy consignments—but also the financial and marketing engineering underpinning them and the stories behind them—that generate the excitement, confidence and momentum on which the auction machine now depends.

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