Picasso Painting That Cost S. I. Newhouse a MoMA Board Position Heads to Christie’s for $55 M. 

Christie’s New York is offering 16 top-notch works by titans of the 20th and 21st centuries next month, all from the holdings of the late publishing magnate S. I. (aka Si) Newhouse, head of Conde Nast, who died in 2017. At a packed Rockefeller Center salesroom on May 18, masterpieces by artists including Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol will come to the block. The group is expected to ring up collectively for about $450 million, an enormous sum in any market, but a truly titanic one in a shaky moment in the art market and the global economy.

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Among this stratospheric group, with individual estimates topping out at $100 million, Picasso’s Cubist canvas Homme à la guitare (1913), estimated at $35 million to $55 million, stands out because Newhouse surrendered far more than cash to own it.

Twenty-six years ago, Newhouse actually chose it over the powerful seat he had long held on the board of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, when he controversially acquired it for a reported $10 million after the museum sold it off to bolster its acquisition fund. Newhouse, as a board member, was prohibited by the museum’s policies from buying works being sold by the museum. When museum officials confronted him about it, he resigned, the New York Post reported at the time.

Let’s back up a moment and recount the painting’s fascinating and starry provenance. Legendary dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler sold it in 1913 to none other than literary giant Gertrude Stein. When she died, it went in 1968 to a group of high-powered collectors called the Syndicate of the Museum of Modern Art, formed for the express purpose of buying Stein’s estate; the group, which included Nelson Rockefeller and John Hay Whitney, pledged to donate some of the works to museums. But the Syndicate sold Homme à la guitare that same year to French-American New York investment banker André Meyer. 

A year after Meyer’s death in 1979, it went to MoMA’s collection, and was considered such a prize that it quickly went on show in a 1980 Picasso retrospective and in a 1980–81 show of masterpieces from the collection. It also hung in a 1988–89 Picasso show at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet as well as the seminal MoMA show “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism,” curated by William S. Rubin and organized with Kunstmuseum Basel.

With that level of recognition, Homme à la guitare might have been expected to reside in the museum’s holdings, and indeed prominently on its walls, forever, but no. Museums routinely sell works from their collection, sometimes pieces that are not top-notch or that are considered redundant, as a way to raise funds for new acquisitions, and in 2000, the museum put the painting up for sale. 

“We have a very large collection of Picassos,” a MoMA spokesperson told the Post at the time, “and the curators felt this work was not absolutely necessary to the collection.”

A “major dealer” acquired the piece and sold it to Newhouse, the New York Post reported, for $10 million. (The Post mentioned that Gagosian had helped Newhouse build his collection.)

“It’s believed to be the first time that a trustee has been involved in a conflict over the insider art sale rules,” noted the publication, which pointed out that Newhouse had been on the institution’s board for some 27 years, alongside titans of industry like Leon Black, Ronald Lauder, and David Rockefeller, and had raised tens of millions of dollars for the institution. 

“People die to get on the board,” one dealer told the Post at the time. “Si really did want the Picasso badly—he didn’t care what it did to him.”

Somehow, Newhouse survived his resignation from the board. As Christie’s points out, between 1999 and 2005 alone, he acquired important works by Constantin Brâncuși, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Alberto Giacometti, Matisse, Joan Miró, and Vincent van Gogh, as well as additional works by Picasso.

At least one artwork from Newhouse’s holdings has gone on to global fame. In 2019, Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986) set a new record for Koons and for any living artist, a record that still stands today, when it sold for $91.1 million at a $539 million sale. Where? At Christie’s Rockefeller Center salesroom.