A Jackson Pollock painting has sold for $181 million at Christie's auction house in New York, shattering the previous record for the artist and landing the work among the most expensive pieces ever sold at public auction. The painting, Number 7A, 1948, came from the private collection of the late media magnate Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., who died in 2017, and now ranks fourth on the all-time list of the most expensive artworks sold at auction, according to the leading art platform ARTnews.

Christie's described the vast canvas — which spans more than three metres and depicts black drips of paint with touches of red — as a landmark in art history. "It is with this work that Pollock finally frees himself from the shackles of conventional easel painting and produces one of the first truly abstract paintings in the history of art," the auction house wrote. The previous record for a Pollock at auction was $61.2 million, set in 2021 by his Number 17, 1951, making Monday's sale nearly three times that figure.

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was a central figure in the abstract expressionist movement, a mid-twentieth century American art movement that emphasised spontaneous, expressive technique over realistic representation. His distinctive drip painting method — applying paint by pouring, spattering, and dripping directly onto large canvases laid on the floor — remains one of the most recognisable and widely imitated styles in modern art. Major collections of his work are held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which owns more than eighty of his pieces, and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

The Newhouse sale yielded further records beyond the Pollock. A bronze sculpture titled Danaïde by Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi fetched $107.6 million — the second highest price ever achieved for a sculpture at auction. Works by American painter Mark Rothko and Spanish-Catalan artist Joan Miró also sold for auction record prices, at $98.4 million and $53.5 million respectively.

To put the Pollock sale in broader context, the all-time auction record remains Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450.3 million in 2017. Monday's results underscore sustained demand among the world's wealthiest collectors for blue-chip modernist works, with a single evening's sales producing four new artist or category auction records.