Mr. Market Does Fair Hopping and Art Pricing

Pollock and Rothko go through the roof, plus ghostly spaces, sublime seas, and the power of yarn

O ver the past few days, I went to two art fairs and watched three auctions, my gimlet eye aimed at American art. I’ll start with Monday’s 20th Century Evening Sale at Christie’s, where Agnes Gund’s Rothko sold for $98.4 million, breaking Rothko records. I was very fond of Aggie (1938–2025) and not because of her politics. She was pure limousine liberal, but she was also a lady and a humanist, so she was never in-your-face about it. Her late-period Gilded Age millions came from her Cleveland real estate, bank, and brew-mogul family, and she loved Cleveland as much as New York.

Most of her collection was already dispersed — she gave nearly all of it to museums — but not her Rothko, Two Greens and Red Stripe, painted in 1964. Gund bought it directly from the artist. I’m not a Rothko partisan. I reviewed his massive retrospective in Paris and, after I left, was ready to stand atop the Eiffel Tower and shout “Enough of the stripes already!” Gund’s Rothko is pure magic, though, an emerald square dissolving into jade at the edges, with a royal violet and ultramarine background and a daredevil red stripe between them. In the mid-’60s, Rothko’s colors were darker and more saturated but not somber or sepulchral, as they became before his suicide in 1970.

Aggie was extraordinarily generous to MoMA. She gave it millions in cash as well as a thousand objects and served as its board president for years. Her passion was for loving artists, oddly not an interest of the curators there. They preferred artists who were recently dead, acquiescent, and quiet. Boy, did she change that attitude. And in 2017 she sold Masterpiece, her prize pig of a painting done by Roy Lichtenstein in 1962, for $165 million, using most of the money to launch a time-limited foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, which sought to “eliminate mass incarceration,” whatever that means. It spent $127 million on art initiatives in prisons and direct artist grants — good ideas — and promoted the First Step Act and other initiatives for early release, lenient sentencing, and no bail.

We’re all entitled to our opinions. Mine is that our problem isn’t too many people in the slammer but far too few. Aggie often said she felt guilty for being so rich. You’d sooner see bison waltz than ever hear me say such a thing, if I were rich, that is.

I was very curious about S. I. Newhouse’s art collection, since Newhouse (1927–2017) the master of Condé Nast, was a culture impresario in the Parnassian heights, along with Sol Hurok, David Merrick, Richard D’Oyly Carte, and the old Hollywood studio moguls. The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Architectural Digest were, in their day, tastemakers, creative greenhouses, and talent spotters. Newhouse’s father was the son of Russian immigrants who arrived here from the shtetl sans a single ruble. He made good, a typical American story, in the newspaper business. Si branched out to culture magazines. In his empire he wasn’t the visionary but the string puller, battering ram, and keeper of the green light. What does a man like that collect?

Newhouse’s estate has been selling art every couple of years, a new approach in a market where collections usually sell at once. Christie’s sold only 19 works on Monday. No Old Masters, no Impressionists, no portraits of George Washington, no Grandma Moses, of course, just the bluest of blue-chip New York School. The sale’s cause célèbre has to be Number 7A, 1948, the 11-foot-wide Jackson Pollock painting from 1948. It’s layered, fluctuating allover, with each stream of paint looking as if it’s part of a dance. He’s a one-trick pony, but the trick’s phenomenal. The Abstract Expressionists were the face of the new recipe for success in the art world: New York, American money, and American creativity. Pollock was the leader of the pack. He promoted himself as a cowboy from Wyoming, which he once was, and as a metaphor for America — creative, powerful, hegemonic, like his paint going wherever he wanted, command-and-control style.

It took 60 bids, four bidders, and ten minutes to vie for the prize. At the end, the Pollock went for $181.2 million, his record and in the top three works by any painter in auction history. The top sellers are Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo — though some scholars dispute the attribution — and the pretty but unimportant Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, painted by Klimt around 1914. Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s are having a good spring, but so are U.S. stocks. The Newhouse objects got $630.8 million. The entire Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale made a bit over a cool billion. For the week — called Marquee Week — Christie’s sales totaled $1.45 billion. That’s very, very good.

Sotheby’s does Marquee Week over two weeks. Last week, it sold the late Robert Mnuchin’s Rothko for $85.8 million, a lesser Rothko, de Koonings from close to his Senile Period, a $52.8 million Basquiat, and Andy Warhol’s portrait of Brigette Bardot for $24.8 million. At one point, the auctioneer said a Rothko on the block was “hard to replace.” I beg to differ. Still, over the two, its haul was $908 million — a big boost from 2025. I have to say it’s astonishing to see $630 million spent on art in a mere 45 minutes. That’s how long Christie’s Newhouse sale lasted.

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Lots of tasty treats at the art fairs, too. Around ten years ago, the European Fine Art Foundation, called TEFAF, spread its wings from its annual bigwig fair in Maastricht in the Netherlands and launched a New York edition at the Park Avenue Armory. This year’s, which just ended, featured 88 dealers, and nearly all the art was American.

Over the top in the best way was Macklowe Gallery’s Moorish Turtleback chandelier from around 1900, a Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company hanging piece, 6 feet tall, with amber and green opalescent glass, repeated, dazzling jewel pendants, and little tulip shades made of Favrile glass — the signature iridescent glass invented by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The chandelier’s chain mail–like skirt of amber tiles ending in tiny brass balls is delectable. It resembles a slinky dress, and the large shade above it evokes armor. The designers were happy warriors in the appropriation departments, and good for them. They drew from polycandelas — multi-lamp fixtures — at Hagia Sofia, sixth-century mosaics from Ravenna, Italy, the Empress Theodora’s votive crown in the Basilica of San Vitale, Moorish jewelry, and new electrified theater lighting. Tiffany considered mosaic art the father of stained glass. At $695,000, the chandelier is priced to sell. What’s American about it? Yes, it has lots of European influences, but Americans are fantastic amalgamators, with results that are often both gorgeous and on the edge of bawdy.

Sheila Hicks (b. 1934) is a pioneering fiber artist and among my very favorites. Raised in rural Nebraska, she got her B.F.A. at Yale. In that era, its art school was the one spot that would confer an undergraduate degree to women. While there, she fell under the spell of artists Josef and Anni Albers and the art historians George Kubler and Vince Scully, also my professors. Demisch Denant, the New York dealer specializing in French modern furniture, showed a selection of her work. The centerpiece of its TEFAF booth was a 1981 wall hanging made of silk, linen, and cotton, iridescent and dense, 79 by 69 inches. Weaving is an ancient craft but Hicks makes it modern, and she’s one of the most elegant, nuanced colorists of our age. The Demisch Danant tapestry has a psychedelic palette, so it’s a tonic. Other works draw from the colors of rain forests or Gothic stained glass or the sea or Impressionism. It’s $450,000. What can I say? She’s a giant.

Joseph Stella (1877–1946) was an Italian-born Machine Age artist who came to New York in 1896 to study medicine but soon decided that art school was a better fit. He came to hate it and went back to Italy in 1909, calling America a “black funereal land” with crappy weather. First in Italy and then in Paris, he jumped into Italian Futurist circles, painting explosive, colorful, abstract cityscapes among artists such as Boccioni and Severini. In Paris, he correctly perceived Gertrude Stein, calling her a “pythoness.”

He gave America a second chance, returning in 1913 and befriending Alfred Stieglitz and Marcel Duchamp. He was a wonderful colorist and draughtsman with a geometric period during which he painted his abstract Brooklyn Bridge, the work for which he’s best known. It looks like an altarpiece. He later painted lush, operatic, and realist pictures, fantasies, really, of plants and animals. He’s one of the few Modernist painters to do religious art. He’s an American one-off.

Anthony Meier, a dealer based in Mill Valley, Calif., offered a beautiful portrait of Marcel Duchamp by Stella, done in 1923 or 1924. It’s silverpoint and oil on paper. Silverpoint is an Old Master medium long out of use before Stella revived it for lots of his portraits. The stylus is silver, tin, and lead, soft enough to give the line some heft but good for precision and details, too. Lines tend to be light. The result is an image that’s a tad ghostly. Leonardo, Dürer, Goltzius, and Rembrandt used silverpoint, but it was displaced by graphite. Duchamp and Stella were close friends in the 1920s. The two went together to a New York hardware store in 1917 to buy the urinal that Duchamp made notorious when he signed it “R. Mutt” and submitted it to a Society for Independent Artists exhibition. The Duchamp portrait goes for $140,000, a good deal.

I saw so much fantastic art at TEFAF, but Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Interior of the Great Hall in Lindegaarden , offered by Hauser & Wirth gallery, was the crème de la crème, and a creamy thing it is. Hammershøi (1864–1916) excels in the hush of empty spaces. This hall is grander than most — we get absorbed in imagining the ghosts of the great and the good, the needy and the conniving, those who looked and moved like gazelles there and those we’d mistake for muskrats. He’s not American, but, who knows, after we take Greenland, Venezuela, Cuba, and Alberta, Denmark might be our 55th state.

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One of my favorite fairs is the American Art Fair held every year at Bohemian Hall on 73rd Street near First Avenue. This year’s, May 16–19, was only 17 or so dealers. Bohemian Hall is an old Czech social club, so there’s atmosphere. It’s a mini history of American art from colonial portraits into the 1970s, with lots of idiosyncratic moments. How could there not be? We’re a huge country, egalitarian, with no high-establishment styles and no single art school like the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, which once dictated good taste. I’d call most of the dealers there old-timers, and some are mom-and-pop shops. That’s a salve. The big dealers are treating a conglomerate culture and are killing the field with marketing tricks and cachet.

Three seascapes say much about this fair. At Godel, a dealer specializing in what I call the American Old Masters, I saw a lovely seascape called Becalmed, Long Island Sound, by Martin Johnson Heade. It’s prime Luminism, 14 by 29 inches, with a serene sky, an end-to-end horizon line, and a sea surface that’s aflutter except for two very modest waves hitting rocks and sailboats quietly floating. It’s from 1876, the Centennial, and a good example of the American seascape tradition. Plains and the Rockies aside, we’re a seafaring, seaside country with salt water in our veins. The picture’s $225,000.

Steps away, at Questroyal, another old-time keeper of heritage, I saw Lights of the Aurora, from around 1869 by William Bradford (1823–1892). I hate terms like “stunning” since a work of art tends never to leave me dazed, confused, or temporarily unconscious. I was astounded, let’s say, since I’d done a small Bradford exhibition years ago and I didn’t know that the artist, the Anglo world’s premier iceberg painter, ever did an aurora borealis scene, but here was one. It’s a chromatic whizbang and a different take even on the Hudson River School sunset picture. It’s $195,000.

The wonderful dealer Debra Force always has gems on view and perfect expressions of their time and place. For $85,000, you can get John Marin’s Sea Piece, Small Point, Maine Series #19, from 1928, a watercolor view of swirling waves and hulks of rock from his home on Cape Split in Downeast Maine. It combines Cubism and abstraction — French styles just hitting the American eye — with realism like Heade’s and a cutting-edge, slasher technique. Marin (1870–1953) was rooted in the American seascape tradition of Church, the Luminists, and Homer among many others, but he was also the bridge to gestural abstraction in the 1940s. Pollock loved his work. So, lots of activity. After a lull the past year and a half, the market has a pulse.