Sotheby’s Contemporary Sale at New York was a decent event, but the $85.8 million from Robert Mnuchin’s estate captured eyeballs.
On Thursday, Sotheby’s kicked off its summer season with a contemporary auction at its Madison Avenue HQ in New York. The auction was predictable and offered few surprises, ultimately raising $433.1 million. The decent figure was certainly much better than the auction house’s summer kickoff sale last year, which garnered merely $186.1 million.
The first part of the evening featured 11 works from the collection of late art dealer Robert Mnuchin and his wife, Adriana. The blue-chip collection boasted names like Rothko, Kooning, Kline, and Picasso. Against a presale estimate of $130 million, the collection fetched $166.3 million (including fees).
The star of the night, undoubtedly, was Rothko‘s Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957), an Expressionist work spanning over 7 feet in height. Once in the collection of liquor baron John E. Seagram, Mnuchin bought it in 2003 for just $6.7 million. It went up for auction with an estimate of $70 million – $100 million, and landed right at the middle with $85.8 million. It is now the second-most expensive Rothko, closely trailing behind Orange, Red, Yellow (1961), which fetched $86.9 million in 2012.
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After the Robert Mnuchin estate sale, the contemporary auction with 40 lots began. With one work withdrawn, the remaining lot fetched $266.8 million. The best-seller in that lot was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1983 painting Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), which was sold for $52.7 million with fees (against a $45 million estimate). Willem de Kooning’s Untitled III (1975) sold for $26 million, closer to its lower estimate. The modern works included Joseph Yeager, whose 2021 work The Euphemism sold for $320,000 – a personal record for the artist.
