Christie’s New York is preparing one of its most closely watched sales of the season: 16 works from the collection of the late publishing magnate S. I. Newhouse, expected to bring about $450 million when they come to auction on May 18 at Rockefeller Center.
The group includes major names across modern and contemporary art, among them Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol. With individual estimates reaching as high as $100 million, the sale arrives at a moment when the art market remains uneven and the broader economy is still unsettled.
The most scrutinized lot is likely Pablo Picasso’s “Homme à la guitare” (1913), estimated at $35 million to $55 million. The painting’s provenance is unusually layered, moving from dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler to Gertrude Stein, then to the Syndicate of the Museum of Modern Art, a collector group that included Nelson Rockefeller and John Hay Whitney. It later passed to André Meyer before entering MoMA’s collection.
That museum chapter proved pivotal. MoMA had acquired the work as a major Picasso, showing it in a 1980 retrospective, in a 1980–81 exhibition of masterpieces from the collection, in a 1988–89 Picasso exhibition at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and in the landmark MoMA project “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism,” organized with Kunstmuseum Basel and curated by William S. Rubin.
Yet in 2000, MoMA deaccessioned the painting. Newhouse, then a trustee of the museum, bought it for a reported $10 million, a transaction that drew criticism because board members were barred from purchasing works being sold by the institution. He resigned after the conflict became public.
Christie’s says Newhouse continued to build aggressively between 1999 and 2005, acquiring important works by artists including Constantin Brâncuși, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, and Vincent van Gogh. The sale also recalls Christie’s 2019 auction of Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit,” which brought $91.1 million at the same Rockefeller Center salesroom.
For collectors, the Newhouse offering is not only a test of appetite for blue-chip modern art. It is also a reminder that provenance, institutional history, and market value can become inseparable when a work like “Homme à la guitare” returns to the block.
