Clive Davis’s Art Collection Heads to Auction, Led by Warhol’s Aretha Franklin

Clive Davis spent six decades hearing hits before anyone else did. Now the pictures he lived with are going under the hammer. Christie’s will offer eight works from the late record executive’s collection at its 20th Century Evening Sale in New York this November, a group it values at more than $35 million, and the one everyone will be watching is Andy Warhol’s portrait of Aretha Franklin.

Davis, who died earlier this year at 94, started at Columbia Records as assistant counsel and was running the label by 35, according to the News-Tribune. He later founded Arista Records and J Records and finished as Sony Music’s chief creative officer. He wasn’t known as a big-name collector, and his paintings were largely unseen by the public until now.

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The Warhol is a friendship in paint. Christie’s William Featherby told Galerie that Davis had known Warhol since signing Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and that after a lunch spent trading music-world gossip he floated the idea of a portrait of Franklin. Warhol said yes on the spot. “Both Aretha and I loved it,” Davis said, per Featherby.

The rest of the eight reads like a playlist of Davis’s tastes. A second Warhol portrait shows David Hockney, who has also painted Davis’s portrait, and Hockney’s 2009 landscape Hawthorne Blossom, Woldgate No. 4 is in the sale too. Add a 1992 Joan Mitchell abstraction, pieces by Frank Stella, George Condo and Robert Motherwell, and, from the wider collection, work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jean Dubuffet and Alex Katz, according to USA Art News and the News-Tribune.

Davis framed his eye for art the way he framed his eye for artists. In a statement released by Christie’s, he said he went looking for what moved him.

I am extraordinarily passionate about art, and I am always learning about it. I spend hours going through auction house catalogs, reading about the artists and their work.

Clive Davis, in a statement released by Christie’s, USA Art News

Christie’s hasn’t published individual estimates for most of the works yet. Its post-war and contemporary chair, Sara Friedlander, called Davis someone with “the unique ability to recognize and cultivate great talent in its most nascent phase.” Featherby put the collection in the same terms: “In both his musical career and in building his personal collection, decisions were made from the heart.”

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.