[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/486510561.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tFor much of Tuesday, June 2,, the second floor of Sotheby\u2019s headquarters at Manhattan\u2019s Breuer Building was off limits.<\/p>\n
\n\tSecurity 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\u2014including 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe answer, it turns out, was a Jackson Pollock.<\/p>\n
\n\tAccording to multiple sources, Sotheby\u2019s had quietly organized a private auction for\u00a0Number 19, 1951<\/em>, 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\u2019m told, was $50 million.<\/p>\n \n\tThe sale was conducted with an unusual degree of secrecy. Oliver Barker, Sotheby\u2019s chairman for Europe and the auction house\u2019s star auctioneer, was flown in from London for the event despite the firm\u2019s summer sales season fast approaching across the pond later this month. Barker was reportedly spotted walking around Midtown on Tuesday afternoon\u2014a fact that surprised people just a few blocks away at the Breuer Building, who expected him to be in London.<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to sources, Barker also recorded a video that was sent to prospective buyers in which he spoke about Glimcher\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to one source familiar with the effort, Sotheby\u2019s 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n \n\tBoth Sotheby\u2019s and Pace declined to comment.<\/p>\n \n\tThe attempted sale is notable not only because of the painting involved but because it appears to have been Sotheby\u2019s first serious attempt at a private auction, according to one former auction house source. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Christie\u2019s has developed that format for what that house\u2019s global president Alex Rotter once told me was \u201creserved for only the very highest-quality and highest-priced works\u201d that owners would rather not expose to the public spotlight of a traditional evening sale.<\/p>\n \n\tThe painting was hardly hidden from public view.\u00a0Number 19, 1951<\/em>\u00a0was included in the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s 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 \u201cJackson Pollock: Blind Spots,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \n\tThe timing seemed favorable. Just three weeks ago, S.I. Newhouse\u2019s 11-foot-wide Pollock sold at Christie\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tThe failed sale came just two days before Marc Glimcher, Arne\u2019s son and Pace\u2019s chief executive, publicly outlined plans to reduce the gallery\u2019s staff by roughly 20 percent and cut its artist roster by nearly a third as part of a broader effort to\u00a0unwind the mega-gallery model Pace helped create.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/sothebys-arne-glimcher-jackson-pollock-1234788452\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/486510561.jpg?w=1024″] For much of Tuesday, June 2,, the second floor of Sotheby\u2019s headquarters at Manhattan\u2019s 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\u2014including the $236 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1975678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1975678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1975678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1975678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1975678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}