Pollock Drip Painting Sets $181M Auction Record at Christie’s

A Jackson Pollock drip canvas from 1948 brought $181.2 million at Christie’s, smashing the artist’s auction record and reshuffling the top of the art market.

The most expensive Jackson Pollock ever sold at auction left a Manhattan room on Monday night for $181.2 million, vaulting the Abstract Expressionist’s drip technique into the very small club of nine-figure works.

Number 7A, 1948 came from the private collection of late media magnate S.I. Newhouse and crossed the block at Christie’s in New York. The previous Pollock auction high was $61.2 million for Number 17, 1951, which sold in 2021. This one nearly tripled it.

The canvas spans more than three metres of black drips threaded with red, a piece the auction house called one of the first truly abstract paintings in the history of art. With fees included, the final price now sits as the fourth most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, per ARTnews.

It wasn’t the only Newhouse lot to clear the nine-figure mark. A Constantin Brancusi bronze head sold the same night for $107.6 million, the second-highest sum ever paid for a sculpture at auction. The New York Times framed the back-to-back results as Pollock and Brancusi joining the $100 million club on the same evening.

Works by Mark Rothko and Joan Miró also broke their own artist records during the same sale. The room, by all accounts, did not blink.

Pollock died in 1956 at age 44 after an alcohol-related single-car crash in Springs, New York, where he had developed the drip method by laying canvases flat on his studio floor. He worked the surface from every angle, often with sticks or hardened brushes, in a style critics first dismissed and then canonized. Number 7A landed at the hinge point of that transition, made the same year he fully broke from the easel.

Christie’s positioned the sale as a generational event. The Pollock had not been publicly available since Newhouse acquired it. Prestige’s coverage tracked the evening as a blockbuster day for the auction house, with bidding stretching across phone, in-room and online channels.

For context, the artist’s drip works rarely come to market at all. Most live in museum collections that almost never deaccession. When one does surface, it tends to set a new ceiling.

That ceiling now sits at $181.2 million. The next Pollock to go public will be expected to clear it.