[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/robert-mnuchin-courtesy-mnuchin-gallery-photography-c-richard-a-smith-low-res-e1430515777591.jpg?w=1000″]<\/p>\n
\n\tSotheby\u2019s is preparing to bring works from the collection of the late dealer and financier\u00a0Robert Mnuchin\u00a0to 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe sale will be led by\u00a0Rothko\u2019s monumental 1957 canvas\u00a0Brown and Blacks in Reds<\/em>, estimated at\u00a0$70 million to $100 million, along with a second Rothko from 1949 estimated at\u00a0$15 million to $20 million.<\/p>\n \n\tStanding nearly eight feet tall,\u00a0Brown and Blacks in Reds<\/em>\u00a0dates from Rothko\u2019s most important decade, when the artist developed the luminous stacked bands of color that defined his mature work. Executed in one of the artist\u2019s coveted red palettes, the painting once belonged to\u00a0Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, whose celebrated Seagram Building commission with Rothko would soon follow. Sotheby\u2019s notes that the canvas is one of just\u00a015 monumental paintings the artist created in 1957, most of which now reside in museum collections.<\/p>\n \n\tThe second work,\u00a0No. 1<\/em>\u00a0(1949), comes from a pivotal transitional moment in Rothko\u2019s career, when the artist moved from the nebulous \u201cmultiform\u201d compositions of the late 1940s toward the iconic rectangular color fields that would soon follow.<\/p>\n \n\tThe sale will also feature works by artists Mnuchin championed throughout his career, including\u00a0Willem de Kooning,\u00a0Franz Kline, and\u00a0Jeff Koons, including de Kooning\u2019s\u00a01983\u00a0Untitled XLII<\/em>, a lyrical painting making its auction debut and one of the most significant works from the artist\u2019s final decade to appear on the market in recent years.<\/p>\n \n\tA major work by Kline,\u00a0Harleman<\/em> (1960), will also be on the block. Made during the height of the artist\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tThe Mnuchin material arrives at a moment when Sotheby\u2019s is looking to maintain the momentum it built late last year. In November, the house made headlines when\u00a0Gustav Klimt\u2019s\u00a0Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer<\/em>\u00a0(1914\u201316)\u00a0sold for\u00a0$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\u2019s.<\/p>\n \n\tThe firm has also entered the spring season with encouraging signals from Europe. Earlier this week, Sotheby\u2019s modern and contemporary evening sale in London\u00a0achieved white-glove status, with every lot sold and a total of about\u00a0$175 million, more than doubling the equivalent sale a year earlier.<\/p>\n \n\tFor 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.<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to Sotheby\u2019s, which confirmed the sale on Friday, the works will be presented in an\u00a011-lot dedicated evening auction in May, with additional works offered in the house\u2019s modern and contemporary day sales.<\/p>\n \n\tMnuchin,\u00a0who died in December at age 92, was one of the art world\u2019s rare figures to build two careers at the highest level. After three decades at Goldman Sachs\u2014where he helped pioneer block trading\u2014he opened a gallery and eventually founded Mnuchin Gallery on Manhattan\u2019s Upper East Side, mounting museum-caliber exhibitions devoted to artists like Rothko and de Kooning.<\/p>\n \n\tYet Mnuchin always insisted that collecting, not dealing, was his first instinct. \u201cI\u2019m really a collector at heart who happens to be a dealer,\u201d\u00a0he said in a 2015 interview\u00a0with\u00a0ARTnews<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tHe and Adriana began buying art seriously in the 1970s, gradually gravitating toward abstraction and the artists of the postwar New York School. \u201cWe found we responded to abstraction,\u201d Mnuchin recalled.<\/p>\n \n\tThe collection itself was famously compact. Mnuchin once said the couple owned only \u201c10 to 15 pictures,\u201d though by his own admission they were works of exceptional quality, kept in their homes rather than in storage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/sothebys-robert-mnuchin-collection-rothko-1234776056\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/robert-mnuchin-courtesy-mnuchin-gallery-photography-c-richard-a-smith-low-res-e1430515777591.jpg?w=1000″] Sotheby\u2019s is preparing to bring works from the collection of the late dealer and financier\u00a0Robert Mnuchin\u00a0to 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1812332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1812332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1812332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1812332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1812332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}