A Mark Rothko painting formerly owned by art patron and longtime Museum of Modern Art president emerita Agnes Gund sold at Christie’s on Monday night for a hammer price of $85 million. With fees, the total came to $98.4 million, handily breaking the Abstract Expressionist’s auction record.
The work started with a $60 million bid and received about a dozen bids from buyers represented by several Christie’s specialists, before hammering to strong round of applause to a buyer represented by Rachael White Young, a senior specialist in postwar and contemporary art.
No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), a seven-foot-tall abstraction dating to 1964, carried a $80 million estimate going into the sale, placing it right in the range of the artist’s previous record, set in 2012. The sale of Orange, Red, Yellow (1961), also at Christie’s New York, totaled $86.9 million, just under double its high estimate. Gund’s Rothko measured 93 by 69 inches, roughly similar to the Orange, Red, Yellow, which measured 93 x 81.3 inches. But whereas the latter work was a bright composition of orange and reds, Gund’s was considerably moodier and more complex, featuring deep greens and indigo fields cut by a sharp red-orange stripe along its lower third.
No.15‘s provenance is short and sweet: Gund purchased it directly from Rothko in 1967, three years before the artist died by suicide in 1970. Gund reputedly kept the Rothko hanging in her living room from that point on.
Until her death last September, Gund was a major art collector who often appeared frequently on ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, and having served as president of MoMA from 1991 to 2002. Her collection contained over 2,000 works, created between 1940 and the 2020s, with pieces by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, John Baldessari, and many more.
Rothko’s record was nearly reset last week, when art dealer Robert Mnuchin’s Rothko, Browns and Blacks in Reds (1957), sold at Sotheby’s New York for $85.8 million, just $1 million shy of the record. That work carried a wider estimate, $70 million–$100 million. That work also carried a strong provenance having debuted at Sidney Janis gallery, before entering the collection of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc. It was sold to Mnuchin at Sotheby’s in 2003, after Vivendi, the conglomerate that purchased Seagram in 2001, consigned the work.
