Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850

 The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) is presenting Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850 from January 8 through June 21, 2026. Spanning a century of artistic production, the exhibition reveals the material and technical innovations of the Indian, Chinese, and British artists whose work and lives were shaped by the British East India Company’s global reach. Featuring more than one hundred objects, Painters, Ports, and Profits highlights the beauty and range of the extraordinary artwork produced within the context of one of the most powerful and ruthless corporations in history. 

“This exhibition brings to light an astonishing chapter of global art history, when artistic innovation and exchange flourished under the shadow of empire,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director of the Yale Center for British Art. “It tells the story of direct encounters between artists from different continents and traditions, who responded to one another by experimenting with new materials and methods. We are thrilled to share these important, and rarely seen, works from our collection and to invite new reflection on their artistic legacy.”

Between 1750 and 1850, the Company’s growing commercial, military, and political operations linked an incredibly varied group of artists—amateurs, soldiers, and professionals—into a vast network that stretched from London to Calcutta (Kolkata) to Canton (Guangzhou). As goods, people, and ideas circulated through the Company’s networks, artists experimented with papers, pigments, and methods, adapting techniques from different traditions to develop a striking visual language that connected art to the expanding global economy. 

“We are excited to take visitors on a journey to ports and trading cities across India and China where artists produced captivating and innovative works of art,” said exhibition curators Laurel O. Peterson and Holly Shaffer. “The period of the East India Company is one in which art and business intersected. There is a profound tension between the ventures of a global corporation and the works of beauty created by the artists in its orbit. With technical brilliance, these artists ingeniously fused traditions and materials together to develop new ways of making, picturing, and selling.” 

Years in development, the preparations for Painters, Ports and Profits included extensive original research and careful technical study by curators and conservators at the YCBA in collaboration with conservation scientists at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. The resulting exhibition illuminates the museum’s deep holdings of Asian art, showcasing many exceptional works that have hardly ever or never been displayed. Highlights of the exhibition include stunning small- and large-scale portraits, such as the monumental Woman Holding a Hookah at Faizabad, India (1772) by Tilly Kettle and the intimate Portrait of a Woman (ca. 1850) by an artist from the circle of eminent painter Lam Qua. Watercolor drawings of a great Indian fruit bat by Bhawani Das (1778–82) and breadnut by an artist once known (ca. 1825), among others, record the flora and fauna of the Company’s domain with striking naturalism. A spectacular thirty-seven-foot-long scroll uses delicate watercolor to depict the city of Lucknow, India, in panoramic detail, which recent technical analysis has revealed was completed by multiple artists working in collaboration. 

Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850 is organized by the Yale Center for British Art. The exhibition is curated by Laurel O. Peterson, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the YCBA, and Holly Shaffer, Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University.

Related Publication

Published by the Yale Center for British Art, and distributed by Yale University Press, Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850 offers a richly illustrated account of the intertwined histories of art, trade, and empire. Featuring more than one hundred objects drawn primarily from the YCBA’s collection, including architectural drawings, watercolors, and hand-colored aquatints, the catalog critically reconsiders the vibrant creative exchanges between artists in India, China, and Britian during a period driven by ruthless commercial and colonial expansion.  

Edited by Laurel O. Peterson and Holly Shaffer, Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850 brings together essays by an international group of seventeen scholars, curators, and conservators to shed new light on Indian, Chinese, and British artists who practiced at the confluence of art, commerce, and the British East India Company in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

IMAGES

Lucknow from the Gomti, Lucknow, India, between 1821 and 1826, Yale Center for British Art, Flat B 11.

Tilly Kettle, Shuja al-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, 1772, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Artist once known, Breadnut (Artocarpus camansi), ca. 1825, Yale Center for British Art

Artist once known, A Marriage Procession by Night, Patna, between 1810 and 1840, Yale Ce

Gangaram Chintaman Navgire Tambat, A Rhinoceros in the Peshwa’s Menagerie at Poona, 1790, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Bhawani Das, A Great Indian Fruit Bat or Flying Fox (Ptreopus giganteus), 1778 to 1782, Yale Center for British Art,
Paul Mellon Fund

Artist once known, Yellow-eyed Babbler (Chrysomma sinense) Perched on Chinese Hat Plant (Holmskioldia sanguinea), ca. 1770, Yale Center for British Art,
Paul Mellon Collection

Tilly Kettle, A Woman Holding a Hookah at Faizabad, India, 1772, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Going Modern: British Art, 1900–1960

This spring, the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) presents Going Modern: British Art, 1900–1960, an exhibition tracing how artists in Britain negotiated the challenges and opportunities of modernism in a rapidly changing world. Drawn from the museum’s renowned collection, the exhibition features more than seventy paintings and sculptures by some of the most compelling figures of twentieth-century British art, including Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach. 

“Going Modern demonstrates the richness and complexity of Britain’s engagement with modernism,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, YCBA. “The exhibition reveals how artists working within a deeply rooted national tradition responded to the changing world around them, developing innovative forms of expression that continue to shape our understanding of modern art today.”

The first half of the twentieth century in Britain was marked by dramatic transformation: new technologies, shifting social and political orders, and the upheavals of two World Wars. For artists, these developments posed a vital question: how could a nation so deeply rooted in tradition forge its own modern identity? “Going modern and being British,” as the painter Paul Nash observed, was never straightforward.

“Through the lens of the YCBA collection, Going Modern illuminates how British artists met this challenge with imagination and diversity of approach,” said exhibition curator Lucinda Lax, Interim Head of the Curatorial Division and Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the YCBA. “Together, they created a dynamic and multifaceted modernism—one that encompassed the abstract and the figurative, the geometric and the expressive, and ultimately brought them together in increasingly powerful ways that continue to resonate and inspire today.”

Highlights of the exhibition include early twentieth-century paintings by Walter Sickert and members of the Camden Town Group, which capture the modern city’s atmosphere and rhythms; works by Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant that exemplify the Bloomsbury Group’s experimental spirit; and Ben Nicholson’s elegant abstractions, which helped define a distinctly British modernist aesthetic. The groundbreaking sculptures of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth stand alongside powerful figurative paintings by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach, whose intense psychological visions marked a new era in postwar art. Other featured artists—among them Paul Nash, Prunella Clough, Keith Vaughan, and William Turnbull—demonstrate the extraordinary range of styles that characterized Britain’s artistic identity in the first half of the twentieth century.

Going Modern: British Art, 1900–1960 is organized by the Yale Center for British Art and curated by Lucinda Lax, Interim Head of the Curatorial Division and Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, with Rachel Stratton, independent curator and former Postdoctoral Research Associate at the YCBA.

IMAGES

C. R. W. Nevinson, The Wave, 1917, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

Ben Nicholson, May 1955 (Gwithian), 1955, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
© Angela Verren Taunt. All rights reserved, DACS, London / ARS, NY 2025. Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

Barbara Hepworth, Biolith, 1948–49, Yale Center for
British Art, gift of Virginia Vogel Mattern in memory of her husband, W. Gray Mattern, Yale BA 1946. Barbara Hepworth © Bowness. Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

Lucian Freud, Girl in a Dark Dress, 1951, oil on canvas, anonymous loan. Lucian Freud Archive © Bridgeman Images. Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

Edward Wadsworth, Sea-verge, 1943, tempera on board, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

Walter Sickert, La Giuseppina, 1903 to 1904, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Roger Fry, La Ciotat, ca. 1915, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, gift of Lois Severini and Enrique Foster Gittes, Yale BA 1961.

Paul Nash, Mineral Objects, 1935, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

Vanessa Bell, Self-Portrait, ca. 1915, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London.
Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

Francis Bacon, Study of a Head, 1952, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, gift of Beekman C. and Margaret H. Cannon. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2025. Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

Henry Moore, Helmet Head No. 3, 1960, bronze,

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
© The Henry Moore Foundation. All rights reserved, DACS 2025 / www.henry-moore.org. Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

Harold Gilman, Stanislawa de Karlowska, ca. 1913, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.å 

Jasper Johns Copy/Trace

David Zwirner 

537 West 20th Street, New York, 2nd Floor

 May 7–June 26, 2026 

As curator Jeffrey Weiss writes: 

Broadly speaking, Johns’s pictorial work—painting, drawing, and printmaking—reflects an intensive application of material means. Much is said about iconography in his oeuvre: the flag, the map, the target, and the number, as well as numerous other figures drawn from sources both well-known and obscure. Johns largely denies the symbolic significance of chosen motifs, even as he accepts the inevitability of their allusive charge. Perhaps most important is that a Johns work is, to paraphrase the artist, both objectand image. Across decades, single figures and signs are relentlessly transformed. “I am,” he said, “concerned with a thing’s not being what it was.” 

 

Johns has long deployed multiple ways of producing work, self-imposed methods of restriction through which, counterintuitively, invention is set free. Such procedures include repetition, rotation, superimposition, and reversal, along with changes in medium, color, format, and scale. In this context, three direct forms of representation are fundamental. Two can be designated by the term trace—trace as both noun and verb. The first is the trace of the body: a series of works solely containing direct imprints in oil and charcoal on paper of Johns’s head, face, hands, pelvis, or torso. The imprint is revealed by the application of charcoal in broad strokes. The second is that of tracing: literally, using ink to trace an existing image—typically a photograph in a magazine or book—onto a sheet of translucent Mylar.

 

The traced image is often obfuscated by intricate patterns of pooled ink and water-based paint, a technique of controlled chance well-served by the fluidity of the medium and the non-absorptive nature of the plastic support. The third form of representation relating to Johns’s restriction of means is that of the copy: the depiction through drawing of given examples of the artist’s own painted work. Together, the three means of representation are, as operations, unassuming and direct, but their implications—presence and absence, actuality and metaphor, memory and forgetting—can be haunting and complex. At stake is a recursive poetics of representation grounded in the process of the work. 

The exhibition at David Zwirner includes works on paper from the 1960s and early 1970s that exemplify Johns’s nascent and ongoing interest in using the body as both subject and tool, including a suite of four major drawings on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, Study for Skin I–IV (1962). 

The artist produced these by coating his face and hands with oil which he pressed into the paper before then covering these imprints with broad strokes of charcoal, resulting in spectral images that grow more abstract with each iteration. 

Other works on view showcase Johns’s practice of producing variants or copies of his own work, such as Target with Four Faces from 1968 (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, loan from Collection Jean-Christophe Castelli), for which the artist returned to one of his most iconic paintings over a decade after its creation (the 1955 work of the same title in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York), drawing in various mediums over a proof for a 1968 screenprint made after the same composition. Disappearance II and Device (both 1962; private collections) were Johns’s first works in ink on plastic, a material approach that appealed to him because of what he termed its “independence.” The works were made, respectively, after a 1961 painting in the collection of Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, Japan and a painting-assemblage from 1961–62 in the Dallas Museum of Art.

A significant group of works in the exhibition highlights Johns’s tracing of reproductions of works by other artists from posters, books, and elsewhere.

In Tracing (1978), Johns references two artists at once, having traced an impression of Jacques Villon’s 1934 etching The Bride, which itself was made after Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting of the same title (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Examples of Johns copying works by other artists—Cézanne, Holbein, Picasso—over the following decades are also on view. Johns also traced other kinds of photographs. Untitled, a monotype from 2015 (Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland) and a rare instance of color in the show, is one of several works Johns made beginning in 2002 that reproduces photojournalist Larry Burrows’s 1965 image of Marine Lance Corporal James C. Farley in Vietnam, seen distraught after a failed mission under his command—an image published in a 1965 issue of Life magazine but discovered by Johns in a book published in 2002. Jasper Johns: Copy/Trace is the second exhibition curated for the gallery by Jeffrey Weiss, following Ad Reinhardt: Print—Painting—Maquette that was presented at the same location in 2024. Weiss, an independent curator and critic, is regarded for his monographic exhibitions and extensive scholarship on twentieth-century European and American art. Between 2010 and 2018, he was a senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where, with Francesca Esmay, he co-organized the Panza Collection Initiative, an eight-year study project devoted to the institution’s vast holdings in Minimal and Post-Minimal art. Weiss organized the celebrated 2007 exhibition Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965 during his tenure at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, where he was curator and head of modern and contemporary art from 2000 to 2008. This exhibition coincides with two other projects devoted to this important artist: Jasper Johns: Night Driver, a retrospective of the artist’s work on view at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from May 29 to October 12, 2026; and Jasper Johns: Flags, at Craig Starr Gallery, New York, on view through June 27, 2026. Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is among the most prominent and inventive American artists of the twentieth century. He was born in Augusta, Georgia and briefly studied art in South Carolina before moving in 1953 to New York, where he spent the majority of his adult life. He had his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958 and immediately gained renown for his groundbreaking, innovative use of common objects, repeated motifs, and found imagery. Over seven decades, Johns has developed a singular career that has both influenced and surpassed major movements including pop art, minimalism, and conceptualism. His work continues to upend traditional art-historical hierarchies and challenge the definition of what an artwork can be. In 2021, the two-venue retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror was on view simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Johns lives and works in Sharon, Connecticut. Notes 1. Jasper Johns in Gene Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Part 2.” Artnews 62, no. 10 (February 1964), p. 43. 

“Across the Nation” National Gallery of Art

The National Gallery of Art has announced details of its “Across the Nation” partnership program bringing key works of art from its permanent collection to regional museums across the United States in 2025 and 2026. Through “Across the Nation,” the National Gallery has lent works of art by renowned artists from its collection—including Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Dorothea Lange, Sandro Botticelli, Rembrandt van Rijn, Henri Matisse, and Mark Rothko—to 10 partner museums in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington. This program creates unprecedented access to the nation’s masterworks by placing them directly in communities throughout the country. “Across the Nation” is part of the National Gallery’s programming commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States of America in 2026.

Partner institutions have each selected between one and ten artworks on loan—spanning painting, photography, and installation—from the National Gallery’s collection. Partners include Anchorage Museum (Anchorage, AK), Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO), Figge Art Museum (Davenport, IA), Flint Institute of Arts (Flint, MI), Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC),  New Britain Museum of Art (New Britain, CT), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, UT), and Whatcom Museum (Bellingham, WA). The Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV) is presenting an iteration of the National Gallery’s 2023–2024 exhibition Dorothea Lange: Seeing People. 

All “Across the Nation” presentations will be on view by May 2025, with several presentations on view now.

Partner institutions were selected to broaden access to the nation’s art collection in as many regions of the United States as possible. The lending program—including expenses associated with the transport and installation of the artworks—is supported by the National Gallery, with minimal to no cost for partner institutions. The National Gallery is also providing additional support by way of conservation services and training, as well as marketing. Marketing campaigns within the museums’ local communities are underwritten as part of the program, creating greater awareness for the program, and the National Gallery is collaborating with partners to develop and execute digital and educational programming pegged to their “Across the Nation” presentations in 2025–2026.

“‘Across the Nation’ is the manifestation of the National Gallery’s vision as the nation’s art museum, and we are so thrilled to bring some of the most beloved works from the nation’s collection of art directly into communities across the country,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art.

For their “Across the Nation” presentations, partner museums selected works from the National Gallery’s collection that bring new perspectives to their own installations and complement public programs and interests of their respective communities. Loans include:

• On view now, the Anchorage Museum (Anchorage, AK) is exhibiting paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, and Nancy Graves.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Winter Road I, 1963, oil on canvas, Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1995.4.1

• On view now, Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO) is presenting a painting by Rembrandt van Rijn alongside a portrait of Rembrandt painted by his studio, both from the National Gallery’s collection, offering a new perspective on the artist.

Rembrandt van Rijn, A Woman Holding a Pink, 1656, oil on canvas, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.75

• On view now, the Whatcom Museum (Bellingham, WA) features works by leaders of the impressionist movement, including Henri Matisse, Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cezanne.

Henri Matisse, Still Life with Sleeping Woman, 1940, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1985.64.26

• On view now, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, UT) presents a large-scale wall drawing by Sol Lewitt—marking the second time the work has ever been on view.

• Opening in April, Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID) will exhibit paintings by Mark Rothko, Berthe Morisot, and Thomas Eakins.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1950, pigmented hide glue and oil on canvas, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc., 1986.43.159

• Opening in April, the Flint Institute of Arts (Flint, MI) will exhibit three paintings spanning the breadth of art history by Sandro Botticelli, Hans Memling, and Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol, Mao, 1973, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Friends of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2014.79.50

• Opening in April, the Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC) will exhibit three paintings by Alma Thomas, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Edgar Degas.

Alma Thomas, Autumn Drama, c. 1969, acrylic on canvas, Corcoran Collection (The Evans-Tibbs Collection, Gift of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2015.19.211

• Opening in May, the Figge Art Museum (Davenport, IA) will exhibit 10 historical masterworks from Northern Europe dating from 1537 to 1700, by artists including Lucas Cranach the Elder, Anthony van Dyck, Frans Hals, and Louis Vallée.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Nymph of the Spring, after 1537, oil on panel, Gift of Clarence Y. Palitz, 1957.12.1

• Opening in May, the New Britain Museum of Art (New Britain, CT), will present a historical painting by Robert Duncanson and a painting by Winslow Homer.
• 
  
  Robert Seldon Duncanson, Fruit Still Life, c. 1849, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase through a gift from the Reserve for Purchase of Works of Art), 2014.136.106

Robert Seldon Duncanson, Fruit Still Life, c. 1849, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase through a gift from the Reserve for Purchase of Works of Art), 2014.136.1

Winslow Homer, East Hampton Beach, Long Island, 1874, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 2012.89.2

Christie's Masterpieces: The Private Collection of S.I. Newhouse May 18

  Christie's has announced Masterpieces: The Private Collection of S.I. Newhouse, a seminal group of 16 works that will be offered in a single-owner sale headlining Spring Marquee Week in New York. The works are from the personal collection of S.I. Newhouse, among the most historically significant collectors of all time, and are anchored by two exceedingly rare works: a painting by Jackson Pollock and a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, with 14 additional masterpiece artworks by cross-generational icons including Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. The full selection will be on view in an exhibition taking place at Christie's Rockefeller Center galleries in May ahead of the sale on May 18. The lots will be presented in chronological order, starting with the earliest object and ending with the most recent. The sale is a visual unveiling of one watershed moment after another, showcasing the inception of all-important movements, styles and techniques ranging from Cubism and Neoplasticism to Action painting and Pop Art. In total, the group is expected to realize in the region of $450 million.

Tobias Meyer, advisor to the Newhouse family, remarks: “Si always looked for the highest quality, regardless of what he was looking at: works of art that expressed what the artist, whether Picasso, Brancusi, Pollock or Johns, wanted to say at the peak of his creative output, and extraordinary provenance and rarity. He was also fearless in editing his collection. He owned the most important paintings by the most important artists, selling at times, buying things back at others, over many years of study and rigor putting together a collection without parallel.”

Max Carter, Global Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, Christie's: “Georges Braque famously compared the creation of Cubism with Picasso to mountaineering. Si Newhouse's collection is nothing but peaks, representing the distilled genius and taste of the 20th century's greatest artists and collectors—from Picasso and Brancusi to Pollock and Johns, from Gertrude Stein and Rene Gaffé to Katharine Graham and Emily and Burton Tremaine. In sixteen lots, the selection traces the genesis of Cubism, the birth of modern sculpture, the reinvention of easel painting and the making of Pop art at the highest level. The Newhouse Brancusi, one of modernism's few truly perfect objects, was the world record for any sculpture by any artist when it was acquired at Christie's in 2002, and Pollock's Number 7A, 1948 is by far and by any measure the most important painting by the artist to appear at auction in decades. What defines “a Newhouse masterpiece”? To be the first, the best and the most essential.”

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912-1956) Number 7A, 1948, oil and enamel on canvas, 35 x 131½ in. (88.9 x 334 cm.) Painted in 1948, Estimate on Request, in the region of $100 million

Among the two top lots in the sale is Number 7A, 1948 by Jackson Pollock, a monumental and breathtaking canvas that measures 131 ½ inches (334 cm.) wide, making it the largest example of his monumental drip paintings remaining in private hands. The work represents a critical moment both in the artist's career as well as in the history of painting in its entirety; it was conceived during a pivotal three-year period for the artist that began in 1947, when he first fully embarked on the creation of purely abstract paintings, with his drip paintings standing as his most celebrated canonical contribution—now icons of post-war American painting. The cultural and historical significance of Number 7A, 1948 cannot be overstated. It has a rich history of provenance, beginning with the photographer Herber Matter, to whom Pollock gifted the work, followed by renowned collectors Kimiko and John Powers. For nearly half a century, the work has been unseen by the public, exhibited most recently at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1977. This will be the first and only large-scale drip painting to ever appear at auction, presenting collectors with a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

A second pillar of the incredible collection is Danaïde, an extraordinarily rare sculpture by a master of modernism whose work seldom appears on the market, Constatin Brancusi. Conceived and cast in 1913, Danaïde is transcendent, a golden idol synthesizing visual cultures across ancient civilizations and the modern era. It references Egyptian sculpture in stylistic structure, Greek mythology in title, and East Asian statue in its delicate gold leaf and black patina. Of the six bronzes cast of this model, four are held in institutional collections: the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate, London; and Kunst Museum, Winterthur. This sculpture is the only gilded example left in private hands. The work was originally acquired by Eugene and Agnes Meyer in 1914 at Brancusi's first one-man show at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery in New York City, then passed to their daughter who sold it to S.I Newhouse at Christie's in 2002, where it established a new record for any work of modern sculpture at the time.

An unmatched selection of four works by Pablo Picasso presents the best of the iconic artist across mediums and eras, led by the groundbreaking sculpture Tête de femme (Fernande) from 1909, representing the inception of Cubist sculpture. Homme à la guitare is Picasso's most significant painting from 1913, a pivotal year in the history of Cubism. Formerly in the collections of Gertrude Stein and the Museum of Modern Art, the work features the beloved motif of the guitar juxtaposed with vibrant colors, patterns, and letters, standing as a bold declaration of the arrival of Synthetic Cubism.

Three exemplary works by living legend Jasper Johns trace an outline of S.I. Newhouse's nuanced understanding of the contemporary icon's practice. In 1954, Johns famously destroyed all of his previous work and started anew, employing numbers, letters, targets, and flags—rudimental building blocks of communication that have become hallmarks of the artist's most coveted works. Mr. Newhouse's first acquisition was the brightly colored Alley Oop from 1958 which he purchased in 1988, followed by the purchase of the 1955 canvas Figure 2 in 1997. His final acquisition was Gray Target in 1998, which is among the artist's greatest masterpieces. The work was acquired by the legendary dealers Ileana and Michael Sonnabend in 1960, and when Mr. Newhouse purchased it in 1998 he became the only other owner of the work. It has been a pillar of his collection for nearly 30 years, demonstrating both his deep intellect as well as his sophisticated eye for quality.

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  
• Lot 3 A

  PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

  Homme à la guitare

  
  EstimateUSD 35,000,000 - 55,000,000
  

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

Tête de femme (Fernande)

Estimate

USD 40,000,000 – USD 60,000,000

• 
  
  PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

  Homme à la guitare

  Estimate
  USD 35,000,000 – USD 55,000,000
• 
  

• CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI (1867-1957)

  Danaïde

  
  Estimate on request
  

• PIET MONDRIAN (1872-1944)

  Composition with Large Red Plane, Blue, Gray, Black and Yellow

  
  EstimateUSD 35,000,000 - 55,000,000
  
• 
  

  JOAN MIRO (1893-1983)

  Portrait de Madame K.

  
  EstimateUSD 25,000,000 - 35,000,000
  
• 
  

  HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954)

  Robe noire et robe violette

  
  EstimateUSD 30,000,000 - 50,000,000
  

• 

• PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

  La femme enceinte, 1er état

  
  EstimateUSD 18,000,000 - 25,000,000
  
• 
  

  FRANCIS BACON (1909-1992)

  Study for Portrait I (after the Life Mask of William Blake)

  
  EstimateUSD 4,000,000 - 6,000,000
  
• 
  

  ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG (1925-2008)

  Levee

  
  EstimateUSD 7,000,000 - 10,000,000
  
• 

  JASPER JOHNS (B. 1930)

  Figure 2

  
  EstimateUSD 10,000,000 - 15,000,000
  
• 
  

  JASPER JOHNS (B. 1930)

  Gray Target

  
  EstimateUSD 20,000,000 - 30,000,000
  
• Lot 14 A

  JASPER JOHNS (B. 1930)

  Alley Oop

  
  EstimateUSD 6,000,000 - 8,000,000
  

• ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)

  Voodoo Lily

  
  EstimateUSD 6,000,000 - 8,000,000
  
• 
  

  ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)

  Do It Yourself (Violin)

  
  EstimateUSD 20,000,000 - 30,000,000