And I Alley Oop

Jasper Johns, Alley Oop, 1958, oil on newsprint and paper on cardboard mounted on masonite, 23 1/4 x 18 in., selling from the collection of S.I. Newhouse at Christie’s on 18 May 2026 Some of the most amazing artworks in S.I. Newhouse’s collection are coming up for sale, and of the sixteen works at Christie’s next month, Jasper Johns’s Alley Oop is the one I’d place an insider petroleum futures trade about the reopening of the Straits of Hormuz for. Actually, no, but it is l0w-key the best, even among some greats. Though it is similar in form to Johns’s two Flag on Orange Field paintings that precede it, it’s based on an entirely different found image: a comic strip about ae thrown-out-of-time caveman named Alley Oop, collaged onto a piece of cardboard, and abstracted with gestural brushstrokes in oil. The provenance is tight, not because it was in S.I.’s collection, but because Johns made it for Rauschenberg, and it stayed with him until Newhouse bought it in 1988. Christie’s has a…