For much of Tuesday, June 2,, the second floor of Sotheby’s headquarters at Manhattan’s Breuer Building was off limits.
Security guards turned away employees hoping to access the floor, which, when not used as a traditional gallery, is where the auction house stages its biggest and most closely watched auctions—including the $236 million Gustav Klimt painting that last year broke the record for any work of modern art sold at auction. According to sources familiar with the matter, even senior staff were left wondering what exactly was going on upstairs.
The answer, it turns out, was a Jackson Pollock.
According to multiple sources, Sotheby’s had quietly organized a private auction for Number 19, 1951, a monumental Pollock owned by Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher. Measuring nearly five feet tall and four feet wide, the muscular oil-and-enamel work is filled with thick ropes of black paint coiling around each other before colliding into bold abstractions. The asking price, I’m told, was $50 million.
The sale was conducted with an unusual degree of secrecy. Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s chairman for Europe and the auction house’s star auctioneer, was flown in from London for the event despite the firm’s summer sales season fast approaching across the pond later this month. Barker was reportedly spotted walking around Midtown on Tuesday afternoon—a fact that surprised people just a few blocks away at the Breuer Building, who expected him to be in London.
According to sources, Barker also recorded a video that was sent to prospective buyers in which he spoke about Glimcher’s reluctance to part with one of the centerpieces of a collection that, rumor has it, is full of museum-worthy Cy Twomblys and Agnes Martins. If the plan was to make sure nobody noticed, it worked remarkably well.
According to one source familiar with the effort, Sotheby’s could not find enough bidders to get the auction off the ground. The auction was ultimately called off, though it remains unclear whether the painting was returned to Glimcher, sold privately, or remains with Sotheby’s.
Both Sotheby’s and Pace declined to comment.
The attempted sale is notable not only because of the painting involved but because it appears to have been Sotheby’s first serious attempt at a private auction, according to one former auction house source. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Christie’s has developed that format for what that house’s global president Alex Rotter once told me was “reserved for only the very highest-quality and highest-priced works” that owners would rather not expose to the public spotlight of a traditional evening sale.
The painting was hardly hidden from public view. Number 19, 1951 was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark Pollock retrospective in 1999. On page 293 of the catalogue, it was credited to the collection of Milly and Arne Glimcher. More recently, it appeared in “Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots,” an exhibition organized by Gavin Delahunty and Stephanie Straine that opened at Tate Liverpool in 2015 before traveling to the Dallas Museum of Art. There, the work was ever so subtly listed as coming from a private collection, courtesy of Pace Gallery.
The timing seemed favorable. Just three weeks ago, S.I. Newhouse’s 11-foot-wide Pollock sold at Christie’s New York for $181.2 million, the highest price ever paid for the artist at auction. Not everyone agreed with the valuation, however. One source familiar with the effort said the $50 million asking price was optimistic.
The failed sale came just two days before Marc Glimcher, Arne’s son and Pace’s chief executive, publicly outlined plans to reduce the gallery’s staff by roughly 20 percent and cut its artist roster by nearly a third as part of a broader effort to unwind the mega-gallery model Pace helped create.
