The late chairman of Condé Nast assembled a trove of masterworks. Now his $100 million Jackson Pollock drip painting is expected to smash auction records.
Last week, the former Sotheby’s rainmaker was walking through the lobby of Christie’s, opening secret doors. Behind them were works from the collection of Si Newhouse , the late chairman of Condé Nast—the human nucleus of America magazines in the late 20th century—whose commitment to the avant-garde was so profound that he enlisted the painter Barnett Newman as his first art teacher and gallery-hopping buddy.
“Si, being Condé Nast, had access to anybody, so he used that,” Meyer said, standing with Max Carter, chairman of 20th and 21st century art at the auction house, who was walking in front of Picasso’s study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. “So there wasn’t really any barrier to him. He could pick up the phone and say, ‘Hello, this is Si Newhouse. Can we see each other?
’” I’d seen Meyer a few days earlier in Los Angeles at the opening of the David Geffen Galleries, a building named for another one of his clients.
“We are big fans of Zumthor,” he said, referring to himself and his husband, the art adviser Mark Fletcher. “We spent a day with him, we went to see him in Switzerland, we rented houses from him and tried living in one,” said Meyer, walking toward what looked like a wall in the next room, his tone a plummy Frankfurt inflection by way of Vienna. He opened a hidden door.
Behind it was Jackson Pollock’s horizontal drip painting Number 7A, 1948, which sources tell me will go for at least $100 million, but could be pushed way higher in a bidding war—in which case it’ll reset the market for Pollock drip paintings forever.
“If you’re serious about painting, and if you’re serious about 20th-century art, this is your painting,” Meyer said. “It’s just a question of: Are you rich enough or not? ” He got closer to the painting, putting his nose to it.
“The red,” whispered Meyer. “The red that says, like, ‘Okay, pay attention, sweetheart. ’” For decades, perhaps longer than anyone else in history, Meyer has been selling incredibly important 20th-century artworks for gargantuan amounts. While serving as auctioneer at Sotheby’s, he sold Andy Warhol’s Orange Marilyn for over $17 million in 1998, essentially inventing the market for the artist.
Then he sold Picasso’s Boy With a Pipe for $104 million, setting a record for a work of art sold at auction. In 2012, he sold The Scream to Leon Black for $119.9 million, a new record. His clients reportedly included software billionaire Pierre Chen and the filmmaker and designer Tom Ford. In 2006, Geffen allowed Meyer to sell his Pollock to a Pollock-obsessed buyer for $140 million, making it, once again, the most expensive artwork in history.
Meyer still brokers earth-shattering private deals, but for the last decade, he’s been sorting through Si’s deep collection. Si was a client for decades—he bought the record-breaking Warhol Marilyn while Meyer was on the rostrum. Meyer sold him the Pollock. It didn’t take much convincing.
Meyer showed Si an image of the painting, and Si nodded. Meyer would accompany Si and his wife, Victoria, on countless art-buying trips around the world.
“He was one of my favorite human beings. He was so incredibly modest and unpretentious,” Meyer said.
“I would go to Vienna with him in December, not to Palm Beach. He would be in Vienna, and Victoria would learn German, and we would look at art together. ” Here, I’ll add that Vanity Fair is a part of Condé Nast, which the Newhouse family owns, and it was Si who personally revived VF in the ’80s.
Perhaps you’ve read about him in recent titles, such as When the Going Was Good by former VF editor in chief Graydon Carter—Max Carter’s dad, incidentally—or in Michael M. Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite. When Meyer left Sotheby’s in 2013, he was the king of the auctioneers. For the last decade, he’s been discreetly selling pictures with eight-figure price tags to billionaires, avoiding the public hoopla that comes with auctioning off works to the highest bidder.
But he’s dipped his toe back into the art market by representing the estate of Si Newhouse, who, in some estimations, built the greatest collection of art assembled in the latter half of the 20th century. The things Meyer’s already sold from the estate have been spectacular. Warhol’s Shot Orange Marilyn went to Ken Griffin for $240 million. Jeff Koons’s Rabbit sold to Robert Mnuchin for $91 million, a record for a living artist.
And now a group of 16 works will sell publicly for an estimated total of $450 million through Christie’s at the evening sale on May 18. Meyer is spearheading things as the representative for the Newhouse estate, and the sale itself is being led by Carter along with Christie’s global president Alex Rotter.
“This is James Johnson Sweeney’s Mondrian,” he said, referring to the early MoMA curator who went on to run the Guggenheim. “This isn’t just a Mondrian. And of course it is also the one with the red field. And it’s also one that is in beautiful condition.
” The whole collection is like this, Meyer explained, never the easy works, always the tough ones, the ones Si could get passionate about before anyone. Bill Acquavella struggled for years to sell a late Lucian Freud, a nude self-portrait, a tough one. When Si saw it, he pounced, and it’s still in the collection, one of the many knockouts yet to come to market.
What’s remarkable is that Si did sell so much of the collection while he was alive—he basically cleaned house in the ’90s when he moved apartments , simply because they couldn’t fit on the walls of the new place. He consigned to auction and to dealers, letting Larry Gagosian put stuff discreetly on the market, floating things out there.
“That’s the interesting part that we haven’t talked about, Si’s editing—the ability of the pen to cross out a paragraph,” Meyer said. “He was absolutely unsentimental about selling things. I once stood in front of a Rauschenberg with him in a Rauschenberg exhibition at The Met, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s a good painting. ’ I said, ‘Well, you used to own that.
’ He said, ‘I did? ’ Completely uninterested in the past. ” Next to the Pollock was a Picasso that once hung in the Paris salon run by Gertrude Stein, who held onto it until her death.
“He owned, as I said, Jasper Johns’s Out the Window and then False Start,” Meyer said. “He owned the Pollock that I sold for David Geffen. He owned the Orange Marilyn. He owned the bunny.
He owns this—he owns Gertrude Stein’s Picasso from 1913 that she bought from him. This is not any Picasso, this is her Picasso. ” Meyer said he was going to blow my mind one more time. He left the little room carved out from the Christie’s lobby to find another secret door.
Behind it was Constantin Brâncuși’s breakthrough sculpture, Danaïde.
“I call this the center of the universe,” Meyer said. “It’s 1913. This is the birth of modern sculpture, not just for Brâncuși, but for the world, which is a big statement,” Carter said.
“He was apprenticing for Rodin six, seven years before. That’s how close this is to the 19th century, this old, more naturalistic tradition. And this is the most radical simplification of form that art has done. This was the gateway to modern sculpture.
” “This is it,” Meyer said.
“This is modern sculpture. ” I asked how it was installed at the Newhouse apartment, and Meyer flicked his eyes up to picture the apartment as it was furnished back then, with all the things he bought for Si. A Brice Marden calligraphy painting. A Warhol landscape.
A Matisse. A Giacometti. Even with Meyer’s many projects and clients around the world, placing works from the estate of Si Newhouse is a cherished assignment.
“It’s almost as if it’s a safe, beautiful, clear island I can swim back to whenever I need that clarity and quality,” he said. “It’s a beautiful space that I’m allowed to inhabit. ” Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.
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