When Agnes Gund bought Mark Rothko’s 1964 abstraction No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) in 1967, she purchased it directly from the artist in his studio. The painting would go on to hang in her living room for decades. This May, it will be offered on the secondary market for the first time, leading a focused group of works from her collection at Christie’s.
The auction house announced today that it will offer three pieces from the personal holdings of Gund, who died last September, during its marquee May sales in New York: the Rothko, estimated in the region of $80 million; Cy Twombly’s 1961 Untitled, estimated at $40 million to $60 million; and Joseph Cornell’s 1948 Untitled (Medici Princess), estimated at $3 million to $5 million.
The grouping is small but serious. Rothko, Twombly, and Cornell all artists who reshaped postwar art in distinct ways, and these works are ones Gund, a longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and its president from 1991 to 2002, lived with, not just collected. That provenance will almost certainly drive up collector interest and bidding for the work.
The Rothko is the clear headline lot. Painted in 1964, the canvas rises more than seven feet tall. Deep greens and indigo fields are held in place by a sharp red-orange stripe that cuts across the lower third. Gund first saw it during a studio visit, and it remains one of only a handful of Rothko paintings bought directly from the artist that are still in private hands. For years, it anchored her apartment, a daily presence rather than a trophy on loan to history.
Mark Rothko, No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), 1964.
Courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd.
The Twombly, made in Rome in 1961, comes from a pivotal period when his looping lines and bursts of pigment felt newly urgent. Works of similar scale and ambition now sit in major museum collections. The Cornell, by contrast, is intimate. Created around 1948, the box construction layers Renaissance imagery with found materials to create one of the artist’s dreamlike stage sets. Together, the three works offer a snapshot of Gund’s range as a collector, from monumental abstraction to quiet, meticulous assemblage.
For Christie’s, the sale lands at a moment when the market is again hungry for fresh-to-market property with clean provenance. The Rothko has never appeared at auction. It comes from a single-owner collection that carries both institutional and emotional weight. In a season when sellers are cautious and buyers selective, that kind of story matters.
Gund was far more than a collector with good timing. Born in Cleveland in 1938, she began buying art seriously in the 1960s and joined MoMA’s International Council in 1967 and then the board in 1976. She served as the museum’s president from 1991 to 2002 and donated more than 1,000 works to the museum over the course of her life, along with hundreds more to other institutions. She helped bring the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center under MoMA’s umbrella in 1999 and served on the board of the newly formed MoMA PS1 until her death.
Long before museums made a point of broadening their collections, Gund was buying work by women and artists of color and urging institutions to do the same. She spent as much time in artists’ studios as she did in boardrooms. Collecting, for her, was personal.
In 2017, she made headlines beyond the art world when she sold Roy Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece for $165 million and directed roughly $100 million of the proceeds toward the Art for Justice Fund, an initiative focused on criminal justice reform. That move reframed how some collectors think about the power of a single painting.
The three works coming to Christie’s are not being sold to fund a public initiative. They arrive instead as a final chapter in a collection that has already reshaped museums across the country. Before the May auction, the Rothko and Twombly will travel internationally, adding a global tour to works that once lived quietly on the walls of her Park Avenue home.
