Sotheby’s Private Pollock Sale Collapses as Modigliani Heads to London
Sotheby’s made an unusually discreet push to place a major Jackson Pollock painting in a private sale last week, only to abandon the effort after failing to attract enough bidders. The work, Number 19, 1951, belongs to Pace founder Arne Glimcher and was estimated at $50 million. Measuring nearly five feet tall and four feet wide, it was the kind of canvas that would normally command attention. Instead, the sale appears to have vanished almost as soon as it was assembled.
The episode offers a revealing glimpse into the limits of the private-sale market. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, auction houses have increasingly used confidential transactions for top-tier works whose owners prefer to avoid the scrutiny of a public evening sale. Christie’s has been especially active in developing that format. Sotheby’s, by contrast, seems to have discovered how difficult it can be to create momentum when the room itself is hidden.
The same roundup of market news points to a more conventional test later this month in London, where Sotheby’s will offer Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu assis au collier (Seated Nude with Necklace), 1917. Estimated at $60.6 million, the painting comes from the artist’s December 1917 exhibition, which police shut down for indecency. The work carries both market weight and historical charge, a combination that has long made Modigliani a fixture of the upper end of the auction calendar.
Elsewhere, the week brought a striking diplomatic note in Russia. Rodney Mims Cook Jr., chairman of the US Commission of Fine Arts, attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and spoke during a plenary session, becoming the first US official to participate in nearly a decade. The forum, often described as Russia’s answer to Davos, has seen Western attendance fall sharply since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The roundup also noted that France’s Conseil d’État rejected an effort to block the loan of the Bayeux Tapestry to London’s British Museum, and that Dataland is preparing to open in Los Angeles as the world’s first museum devoted to AI-generated art. Taken together, the stories sketch an art world moving between secrecy and spectacle, heritage and experimentation, with institutions and markets alike testing how much attention they can command — and how much they can avoid.
