A Mark Rothko painting from the collection of the late New York dealer and financier Robert Mnuchin sold for $85.8 million at Sotheby’s New York on Thursday evening, making it the second-highest price ever achieved for the artist at auction and anchoring a night that brought in a combined total of $433.1 million across two sales.
Brown and Blacks in Reds, painted in 1957 and estimated at between $70 million and $100 million, was offered as the centrepiece of an eleven-lot sale devoted to works from Mnuchin’s personal collection, which preceded the house’s main contemporary art evening auction. Auctioneer Oliver Barker opened the lot at $65 million. Two bidders competed for roughly four minutes before the hammer came down at $74 million, with the winning bid placed by phone through Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe. Barker, at one point during the bidding, acknowledged a phone ringing in the room with a hopeful quip about whether it represented a new offer. It did not.
Mnuchin, who died in December at 92, was one of the most significant figures in the postwar American art market. An investment banker who became a gallerist, he ran Mnuchin Gallery on the Upper East Side and was a sustained champion of the Abstract Expressionists and their generation. The sale dedicated to his holdings also featured works by Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso and Franz Kline. It brought in a total of $166.3 million with fees, landing comfortably within its presale estimate range of $125 million to $178 million. A second Rothko from the collection, No. 1 from 1949, sold for $20.8 million against an estimate of $15 million to $20 million. Guarantees backed all lots in the Mnuchin section.
The main contemporary art auction that followed contributed $266.8 million, bringing the full evening to approximately $433.1 million, roughly 130 per cent more than the equivalent sales held the previous May. Four works went unsold throughout the night, and Alice Neel’s Timothy Collins from 1971 was withdrawn during the auction, resulting in a sell-through rate of 91 per cent.
Brown and Black on Red is a towering canvas, eight feet tall, painted during the decade in which Rothko arrived at the vocabulary that would define his reputation: stacked fields of luminous, atmospheric colour that resist simple description and reward sustained looking. The auction house noted it is one of fifteen large-scale works Rothko painted in 1957, most of which have since entered museum collections. Its provenance includes the liquor company Joseph E. Seagram and Sons. The painting’s dark, warm palette connects it directly to the Seagram Murals, the celebrated thirty-canvas commission Rothko undertook for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in 1958, a project he ultimately withdrew from after deciding the setting was incompatible with the seriousness of the work.
Rothko’s auction record remains the $86.8 million paid for Orange, Red, Yellow at Christie’s New York in 2012, a figure that, adjusted for inflation, would represent around $125.9 million today. David Galperin, Sotheby’s vice chair and head of contemporary art, acknowledged after the sale that some might have expected a more competitive bidding war on the Rothko, but noted that the pool of collectors both willing and capable of pursuing a work of that scale and price is genuinely small, and that large Rothkos have appeared at auction only rarely in recent years without any exceeding $70 million. He described the current market as “discerning but excitable.”
Other results across the evening underlined that characterisation. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) from 1983 sold for $52.7 million, including fees, having last appeared at auction in 2013 at Christie’s London, where it sold for $14.5 million. Valuations expert Rachel Rosan, director of Rosan Art Valuations for Cromwell Art, described the result as a bargain given the bidding she had anticipated. An Andy Warhol portrait of Brigitte Bardot from 1974, appearing at auction for the first time, attracted more than five bidders over nearly five minutes and sold for $24.8 million, setting a record for the series of eight Bardot paintings commissioned by her then-husband, Gunter Sachs. Rosan noted that the health of the Warhol market serves as an indicator of broader collector confidence in the postwar category.
The evening also produced a strong result for Helen Frankenthaler, whose Cape Orange from 1964 achieved $7.3 million, the second-highest auction price for the artist. Sotheby’s holds the record with the $7.8 million paid for Royal Fireworks in 2020. Rosan drew attention to the continuing disparity between what comparable works by male and female artists of the same generation achieve at auction. The Frankenthaler and the Rothko are similar in scale and share certain qualities of palette, yet the price differential runs to tens of millions. Whether that gap will close in any meaningful way remains an open question, though Rosan noted it was not entirely inconceivable.
Thursday’s sales opened New York’s major May auction season, during which the three principal houses are expected to bring between $1.8 billion and $2.6 billion worth of art to market over the course of the week. The Mnuchin Rothko was one of three works in the sale, each carrying an estimate of up to $100 million. Its result, while short of the upper estimate, confirmed that appetite for the best postwar American painting remains serious when the material and the provenance are right.
Mark Rothko Brown and Blacks in Reds, painted in 1957. Photo Courtesy Sotheby’s