Sotheby’s is preparing to bring works from the collection of the late dealer and financier Robert Mnuchin to auction this May in New York, adding a fresh trove of blue-chip material to a season the house hopes will build on its blockbuster November and a strong start to the spring sales.
The consignment is made up of 24 works from the personal collection Robert assembled with his wife Adriana Mnuchin, long known among collectors for its focus on museum-quality examples of postwar abstraction and modern art.
The sale will be led by Rothko’s monumental 1957 canvas Brown and Blacks in Reds, estimated at $70 million to $100 million, along with a second Rothko from 1949 estimated at $15 million to $20 million.
Standing nearly eight feet tall, Brown and Blacks in Reds dates from Rothko’s most important decade, when the artist developed the luminous stacked bands of color that defined his mature work. Executed in one of the artist’s coveted red palettes, the painting once belonged to Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, whose celebrated Seagram Building commission with Rothko would soon follow. Sotheby’s notes that the canvas is one of just 15 monumental paintings the artist created in 1957, most of which now reside in museum collections.
The second work, No. 1 (1949), comes from a pivotal transitional moment in Rothko’s career, when the artist moved from the nebulous “multiform” compositions of the late 1940s toward the iconic rectangular color fields that would soon follow.
The sale will also feature works by artists Mnuchin championed throughout his career, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jeff Koons, including de Kooning’s 1983 Untitled XLII, a lyrical painting making its auction debut and one of the most significant works from the artist’s final decade to appear on the market in recent years.
A major work by Kline, Harleman (1960), will also be on the block. Made during the height of the artist’s career, the monumental black-and-white canvas has been held in the Mnuchin collection for more than two decades and is expected to be among the most important examples by the artist to come to auction in years.
The Mnuchin material arrives at a moment when Sotheby’s is looking to maintain the momentum it built late last year. In November, the house made headlines when Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16) sold for $236.4 million, the highest price ever achieved for a work of modern art at auction and the most expensive artwork ever sold by Sotheby’s.
The firm has also entered the spring season with encouraging signals from Europe. Earlier this week, Sotheby’s modern and contemporary evening sale in London achieved white-glove status, with every lot sold and a total of about $175 million, more than doubling the equivalent sale a year earlier.
For many in the market, the Mnuchin consignment represents exactly the kind of trophy-level material auction houses are eager to secure as the high end of the market steadies after several uneven seasons.
According to Sotheby’s, which confirmed the sale on Friday, the works will be presented in an 11-lot dedicated evening auction in May, with additional works offered in the house’s modern and contemporary day sales.
Mnuchin, who died in December at age 92, was one of the art world’s rare figures to build two careers at the highest level. After three decades at Goldman Sachs—where he helped pioneer block trading—he opened a gallery and eventually founded Mnuchin Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, mounting museum-caliber exhibitions devoted to artists like Rothko and de Kooning.
Yet Mnuchin always insisted that collecting, not dealing, was his first instinct. “I’m really a collector at heart who happens to be a dealer,” he said in a 2015 interview with ARTnews.
He and Adriana began buying art seriously in the 1970s, gradually gravitating toward abstraction and the artists of the postwar New York School. “We found we responded to abstraction,” Mnuchin recalled.
The collection itself was famously compact. Mnuchin once said the couple owned only “10 to 15 pictures,” though by his own admission they were works of exceptional quality, kept in their homes rather than in storage.
