Those two sales amount for new auction records, and mind-boggling amounts of capital expended on culture. What’s remarkable is how, in the room, things felt a bit anticlimactic. For the Brâncuși, Christie’s had brought in a secret weapon: Oscar-winning actor Nicole Kidman. In a spectacle orchestrated by Tobias Meyer, Kidman was chosen because she bore a striking resemblance to the model for Brâncuși’s Danaïde, and she danced around the sculpture in its specially designed cupola. But it’s not clear the marketing moved the needle. In the room, it appeared that the winning bid was placed on behalf of the third-party guarantor, following a series of chandelier bids from Adrien Meyer—meaning that the prearranged price offered ended up being the final hammer.
(Reports leading up to the sale indicated that the entire Newhouse collection was guaranteed by the same collector. I asked one source, a former Christie’s specialist, if it was the house’s owner, François Pinault. They said that was unlikely.)
Sources struggled to initially pinpoint who guaranteed, and then bought, the Brâncuși. When asked on Tuesday, one source guessed it could be a certain New York-based hedge fund billionaire. Los works with a number of clients across the Americas, most of them privately, through the client services division. Similarly, we don’t know who purchased the Rothko, which was bought by Rachael White Young, head of the postwar evening sale, on behalf of a client, for an $85 million hammer price.
There was also much speculation about the identity of the client bidding through Wirth, who may not have won the painting but did a remarkable job going toe-to-toe with Rotter. Some speculated it could be Laurene Powell Jobs, who has bid through Wirth in the past and is known to have an adviser-advisee relationship with the gallerist. But others hastened to add that Wirth, of course, has a number of clients who could be bidding at that level.
Whoever it was didn’t go home empty-handed. A few lots later, Wirth was the winning bidder on Jasper Johns’s Gray Target, for a hammer price of $24.5 million, or $28.8 million with fees.
The scene at Rock Center—before, during, and after the first billion-dollar single-night auction in years—was electric.
“This is a big, big night for you, Tobias,” Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn (who just walked in the Gucci show in Times Square) said to Tobias Meyer and his husband, Mark Fletcher, before the sale started. Then she took her seat in a sales room that held within its tight confines nearly every important secondary market dealer and adviser in New York. I spotted the Nahmad family; Tico and David Mugrabi; Thaddaeus Ropac, who stayed until the end to bid on and win a Duchamp; former Christie’s rainmaker Jussi Pylkkänen; adviser Sandy Heller; Amalia Dayan, Brett Gorvy, and Dominique Lévy of their eponymous gallery; a team from Gagosian Gallery; Per Skarstedt; Christophe van de Weghe; and so many others.
Midway through the 20th-century sale, which followed the suite of Newhouse offerings, some dealers started streaming out of the room as the proceedings approached the three-hour mark. As I was leaving, I caught up with Jeffrey Deitch, who successfully bought two works Monday night on behalf of clients, both once Newhouse’s: Johns’s Alley Oop and Andy Warhol’s Do It Yourself (Violin). As we walked out, we passed another Warhol that had sold that evening: Double Elvis [Ferus Type] which hammered at $23 million, well below the low estimate, or $27.1 million with fees.
