Rare Rothko Leads Multi-Million-Dollar Single-Owner Sales at Sotheby’s

Mark Rothko 1903-1970, Latvia Follow +

A 1957 Mark Rothko will form the centrepiece of Sotheby’s New York evening sale next month, carrying an estimate of $70–100 million USD (£52–74.2 million). Should the work reach the upper end of this estimate, it will break the artist’s current $89.6 million USD (£58.3 million at the time) auction record, set by Orange, red, yellow (1961) at Christie’s New York in 2012.

The work, Brown and Blacks in Reds, has been held by in the collection of celebrated advisor, dealer and collector Robert Mnuchin for more than two decades. It last sold at Christie’s in 2003 for $6 million USD (£4.4 million)—implying a more than tenfold increase at the low end of its current estimate. 

The work features in the opening event of the Marquee Sales on 14 May, which will be dedicated to works owned by Mnuchin. He died in December aged 92 and is described in a Sotheby’s statement as having “a discerning eye” and an “extreme level of connoisseurship”.

The painting is one of only 15 monumental canvases Rothko produced in 1957, the majority of which now sit in museum collections, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago, making private examples scarce. It dates from a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice, the year before the Seagram Murals commission, when his canvases were expanding in both scale and chromatic intensity.

UK’s biggest single-owner sale?

The single-owner sales market has also been buoyed on the other side of the Atlantic by news that a selection of works from Joe Lewis’s collection will be auctioned in June, also at Sotheby’s.

The pieces, amassed by owner of London’s Tottenham Hotspur Football Club Lewis and his daughter Vivienne, include paintings by Lucian Frreud, Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt and Amedeo Modigliani, and are expected to realise more than £150 million, possibly up to £200 million.

Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, told the Guardian that many of the pieces hadn’t come to the market in decades, if at all. Should the works collectively achieve in excess of £101m (with fees), they will set a new record for the most valuable single-owner collection ever to be sold in the UK, The Art Newspaper reports.

Basquiat, Picasso, Van Gogh in New York

The New York sales continue with the Now and Contemporary Evening Auction on 14 May, in which Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) (1983) is estimated in excess of $45 million USD (£33.3 million).

The nearly seven-foot (more than two metre) canvas debuted at Basquiat’s landmark solo show at Gagosian Los Angeles, one of 12 monumental works produced that year. It has since featured in nearly every major institutional survey of his work.

Willem de Kooning’s Untitled III (1975) makes its market debut, estimated at $25–35 million USD (£18.5–25.9 million). The canvas belongs to the East Hampton period, when de Kooning permanently relocated to Springs and returned to painting with larger formats and new paint mixtures.

The Modern Evening sale on 19 May extends the breadth of the offering. Pablo Picasso’s Arlequin (Buste) (1909), estimated in excess of $40 million USD (£29.6 million), was painted just two years after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and stands at the threshold of Cubism.

Vincent van Gogh’s La Moisson en Provence—an Arles-period watercolour and the only work from that body remaining in private hands—carries an estimate of $25–35 million USD (£18.5–25.9 million).

In the day sale (20 May), Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror carries an estimate of $5–7 million USD (£3.7–5.2 million)—the highest ever for a Contemporary Day auction at Sotheby’s. The consignment arrives just days after Christie’s announced another major Lichtenstein work in New York, signalling renewed momentum around the artist’s market across both houses.