Sotheby’s attempted and failed to sell a major Jackson Pollock painting owned by Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher through a private auction held at its Manhattan headquarters on June 2, after the house was unable to attract sufficient bidders for the $50 million asking price, per artnews.com.
The second floor of Sotheby’s Breuer Building in New York was placed off limits to staff for much of that Tuesday, with security guards turning away even senior employees.
The space, which has hosted some of the art market’s most significant sales, including last year’s $236 million Gustav Klimt that set a record for modern art at auction, was the setting for a quietly organised private sale of “Number 19, 1951,” a monumental oil-and-enamel work measuring nearly five feet tall and four feet wide.
Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s chairman for Europe and its best-known auctioneer, was flown in from London for the event, despite the house’s summer sales season approaching. He was reportedly spotted in Midtown on the afternoon of the sale, a detail that surprised colleagues at the Breuer Building who had assumed he was in London. Barker also recorded a video circulated to prospective buyers in which he discussed Glimcher’s reluctance to part with the painting, described as a centrepiece of a collection said to include significant works by Cy Twombly and Agnes Martin.
According to sources familiar with the matter, the auction was called off after Sotheby’s could not assemble enough bidders to proceed. It remains unclear whether the work was returned to Glimcher, sold by private treaty, or remains with the auction house. Both Sotheby’s and Pace declined to comment.
The episode appears to mark Sotheby’s first serious attempt at the private auction format, a model that Christie’s has developed since the Covid-19 pandemic. Christie’s global president Alex Rotter has described the format as suited to works of the highest quality and price whose owners prefer to avoid the public exposure of a traditional evening sale.
“Number 19, 1951” has a considerable exhibition history. It featured in MoMA’s landmark Pollock retrospective in 1999, credited to Milly and Arne Glimcher, and later appeared in “Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots,” an exhibition organised by Gavin Delahunty and Stephanie Straine that opened at Tate Liverpool in 2015 before travelling to the Dallas Museum of Art.
The timing of the attempt was not incidental. Three weeks prior, S.I. Newhouse’s Pollock sold at Christie’s New York for $181.2 million, the highest price ever achieved for the artist at auction. Sources nonetheless described Glimcher’s $50 million valuation as optimistic.
The failed auction came just two days before Arne Glimcher’s son and Pace chief executive Marc Glimcher publicly announced plans to cut the gallery’s staff by roughly 20 per cent and reduce its artist roster by nearly a third, as part of a wider restructuring of the mega-gallery model Pace helped pioneer.
•Featured image: Arne Glimcher attends as Pace London presents an exhibition by Zhang Huan on April 24, 2014/Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images for Pace London
