Sotheby's Icons exhibition, currently on view in New York, is intended as a mini compendium of key auction sales at the house over the decades. And yet, ironically, it is in large part a story about private sales -- and above all, those which brought four masterpieces to the collection of Citadel CEO and mega-collector Ken Griffin, notwithstanding silence in the exhibition wall text about the post-auction sales histories of these paintings.
The first is Basquiat's 1982 Untitled head, which sold to Yusaku Maezawa at Sotheby's in 2017 for $110.5 million, setting an all-time auction record for any American artist (surpassed at Christie’s in 2022 with the $195 million sale of Warhol’s 1964 Shot Sage Blue Marilyn). Maezawa’s $200 million private sale of this Basquiat to Griffin was reported in Artnet News in May 2024, but the story remained publicly uncorroborated until now.
The $200 million price attained for Shot Sage Blue Marilyn was in no small part benchmarked by another private Griffin purchase of a Warhol painting included in “Icons,” namely the closely related Shot Orange Marilyn (1964), originally purchased at Sotheby’s by S.I. Newhouse for $17.3 million in 1988 and much later, in 2017, sold to Griffin for approximately $200 million.
Also in Icons is De Kooning’s Interchange (1955), which sold at Sotheby’s for $20.7 million, but, market-wise, is perhaps best known for its 2015 private purchase by Griffin from music mogul David Geffen for a reported $300 million in a deal reported also to include the $200 million purchase of Pollock’s Number 17A (1948). The $300 million purchase of the De Kooning was the highest known price paid for a work of art in any market, and today, it is still second only to the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci (and/or workshop), which fetched $450.3 million at Christie’s, NY in 2017.
The fourth significant Griffin loan to Icons is Jasper Johns’s False Start (1959), which sold for $17 million at Sotheby’s in 1988 and later, in 2006, was sold by Geffen to Griffin for a reported $80 million. It is worth considering what the painting might bring today, nearly 20 years later.
Irrespective of any possible such price growth, these four paintings comprise a total of approximately $780 million in total realized private sales, none of which is mentioned in the exhibition wall text. This is not a criticism; to the contrary, it was a pleasure and a rare opportunity to be able to see these major paintings, among others, assembled together for what may be the only time, but it’s also worth observing that the unspoken epicenter of this exhibition allegedly about auction sales, is indeed something quite apart than that.
Also not to miss in Icons are brilliant paintings by Kahlo, Klimt, Mondrian, Sargent, Still, and others, all looking their best in the Breuer building, itself a masterpiece.