Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

  • AMMpro
  • AMM Fantasy Collecting Game
  • Podcast
  • Contact Us

Christie’s Has $35m Rothko + 4 Cornell Boxes from de Menils

October 16, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Christie’s has a dark Rothko from the de Menil family estimated at between $35 and $45m. The work was displayed in Rothko’s own home, shown alongside Piet Mondrian, Phillip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock in an exhibit curated by Dominique de Menil in the 1960s. It was later a featured work in the 1978 Guggenheim retrospective held the same year it was bought by François de Menil. Along with the Rothko, four boxes by Joseph Cornell will also be sold:

On 15 November, Christie’s Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art will be highlighted by Works from the Collection of François and Susan de Menil. Encompassing five lots, this grouping encapsulates the impeccable tastes of architect and filmmaker François de Menil, and his wife and business colleague Susan. Leading the selection is a consummate painting by post-war master, Mark Rothko, who is represented by Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) (estimate: $35-45 million). Painted in a period of creative ferment between his two greatest series, the present work was executed shortly after the completion of the Seagram Murals in 1960. During this time, he began to contemplate the shimmering dark plums, blacks, and purples that became the predominant palette in the panels at the Rothko Chapel commission that was soon to follow. Completing the selection, is an exemplary group of four works by Joseph Cornell, made between the 1930’s and 1948.

Ana Maria Celis, Senior Specialist and Head of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, remarked: “It is a privilege to offer five exquisite examples from the distinguished collection of François and Susan de Menil. This group presents a wonderful opportunity to juxtapose the brilliant work of two markedly different artists, Mark Rothko and Joseph Cornell. Although their styles varied dramatically, through the eyes of farsighted collectors, one can see the interconnectedness of two visionary artists who not only worked at the same time, but were inspired by one another’s passions.”

The painting first came into the possession of its current owner in 1978, the same year as Rothko’s stunningly successful retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. However, the history between the de Menil family and Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) dates back much further. Dominique and John de Menil, the legendary collectors who founded the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel, both located in Houston, Texas, had first visited Rothko in his studio in 1960, where the painter showed them the Seagram Murals. The series had originally been commissioned for the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, designed by Mies Van der Rohe, but when Rothko discovered that they had been slated to hang not in the lobby but in the building’s Four Seasons restaurant, he returned the commission and kept the paintings himself. This notorious fit of pique did not deter the de Menils from returning in 1964 and offering him a commission of their own, to paint a series of his own devising that would hang in a chapel in Houston. During the frequent visits that ensued as the couple consulted with the artist and followed his progress, Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) caught the eye of Dominique.

As the construction of the chapel neared completion, Dominique de Menil, then Chairman of the Art History Department of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, proposed arranging an exhibition, “Six Painters,” at the University, which was near the site of the forthcoming Chapel. She requested five works by Rothko, including Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum), which she had seen on the walls of the artist’s personal sitting room in his 69th street studio.

The paintings were exhibited with works by the five other midcentury masters, Piet Mondrian, Phillip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. When the show concluded at the end of the year, the painting returned to Rothko, who possessed it until his death.

Growing up in the environment that he did, François formed a natural affinity for the mysterious and mystical qualities of Rothko’s darker canvases. Some months before the Guggenheim Exhibition, François de Menil approached Arne Glimcher, founder of the Pace gallery who represented the Rothko estate, to express interest in purchasing a painting featuring Rothko’s darker palette. Glimcher offered de Menil, Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum), which would grace the Guggenheim retrospective later that year.

In his review of the Rothko retrospective, the art critic for the New York Times, Hilton Kramer, took the unusual step of describing the museum goers attending the show before turning to the works on display: the crowds were “hushed” “awestruck,” “transfixed,” and they tended to linger, “often turning away from the paintings in front of them to look across the great open space of the Guggenheim spiral at paintings in the distance.”

The Christie’s sale on November 11th will present the second instance that Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) has ever changed hands.

Accompanying the Rothko offering from the collection of François and Susan de Menil, is a quartet of examples by Joseph Cornell. The works are exquisite, speaking fluently in an imagistic language that feels just beyond grasp. The intangible mystery possessed by Cornell’s work runs parallel to a similar quality inhabited by the enigmatic paintings of his close friend Mark Rothko. The two were born just three months apart in 1903, Rothko in Dvinsk, Russia and Cornell in Nyack, New York. They first met by chance in 1949, at the Horn & Hardart automat on 57th Street, where they struck up a friendship that seems to have lasted throughout their lives. In 1957, Cornell sent Rothko’s daughter Kate a book on Fra Angelico, and Rothko’s wife sent back a thank you note with a hand-colored angel that Kate had made for the family Christmas tree. Rothko, despite a reputation as a formidable and imperious figure, was notably gregarious. Nevertheless, he envied the ease and generosity that Cornell displayed around other artists. “I wish I could approach your genius for expressing to people how you think about them and what they do,” he wrote to Cornell in 1959. Then, he gave a wonderful example of his own brand of artistic appraisal: “I do want to tell you that I think of you and the uncanny magic of the things you make.”

Leading the selection of examples by Cornell is Untitled (Medici Slot Machine), 1942. Executed in 1942, Untitled (Medici Slot Machine) comes from
the celebrated eponymous series and emerges as an archaeology of poetry. In this body of works, Cornell adapts three different Renaissance portraits as their
sources. Here Cornell reproduces a painting by Sofonisba Anguissola, titled Portrait of Marquess Massimiliano Stampa in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Although Cornell was known to have almost never traveled beyond the bounds of New York, he was an inveterate traveler of the mind. He was enchanted and obsessed by ideas of the travel of bygone years, in the same way that he was obsessed by the ballerinas of prior centuries. In this sense, his accumulation of materials for his boxes
resembled the souvenir-gathering of the Grand Tour. Here in the present work, Cornell himself brings the magpie tendency of the romantic imaginary traveler of yesteryear to his box, filling it with snippets of different works and maps, subliminal and seemingly random scatterings of thought, interrelation, memory and association. This is a very personal museum of the mind.

Christie’s $30m Rothko from 1954 for May

April 20, 2018 by Marion Maneker

The Contemporary catalogues are still closing for New York’s May sales and the auction houses still have a few very big lots left to announce next week. So sit tight. Making it in just under the wire today is Christie’s with a giant 8ft-tall Mark Rothko canvas once owned by Hollywood studio exec and brief Yahoo! CEO, Terry Semel. The picture has a relatively modest $30m estimate given its massive size and the overall price level for the artist:

Mark Rothko’s monumental canvas, No. 7 (Dark Over Light), 1954, will highlight the May 17 Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art in New York (estimate in the region of $30million). At nearly eight feet tall, No. 7 (Dark Over Light) belongs to a select group of canvases that were among the largest that Rothko ever painted. Its grand scale is matched only by the emotional intensity of its painted surface. Such a highly active painterly surface is a mark of Rothko’s paintings from this important period, but it is the scale on which it has been executed in No. 7 (Dark Over Light) that makes this particular work one of the most extraordinary; its broad sweeps and feathered edges reveal the artist’s ambition to create a pure and direct form of painting. No. 7 (Dark Over Light) is being offered at auction for the first time in over a decade.

Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s Global President, remarked: “No. 7 (Dark Over Light), comes from a small and highly sought-after group of monumental canvases by Mark Rothko. Standing before this radiant picture, one is immediately enveloped by the dramatic brilliance of Rothko’s artistic vision.  Between its intensely kinetic surface and its epic scale, No. 7 is a consummate example of Rothko’s ability to convey pure emotional power. Given the international demand for canvases of this quality by Mark Rothko, we expect that No. 7 will draw enthusiasm from collectors around the globe.”

Rothko’s stated aim was to dissolve the traditional, and what he thought of as artificial boundaries, between paint and canvas, between painter and idea, and ultimately between the idea and the observer. To the artist, what the viewer saw was not a depiction an experience, it was the experience, and to this end he championed what he considered to be the two fundamental elements of picture making—space and color—making these the sole protagonists of his aesthetic drama. Reaching its height in his iconic Seagram Murals, this painterly struggle dominated Rothko’s work for a little over a decade, as in 1968, on the instructions of his doctors, he was forced to retreat into making smaller paintings, often no larger than 40 inches. As a result, works such No. 7 (Dark Over Light) represents the fullest and purest expression of Rothko’s unique artistic vision, one whose visual and emotional power is present in abundance in this magisterial canvas.

No. 7 (Dark Over Light) belongs to a small group of paintings that Rothko executed in the mid-1950s which feature large passages of predominately dark, moody color. Primarily, his paintings from this period are known for the triumphant schema of fiery reds, golden yellows and deep oranges. But in a handful of canvases he also introduced opposing hues, such as can be seen in the present work along with Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange on Gray), 1953 (National Gallery of Art Washington), No. 203 (Red, Orange, Tan and Purple), 1954 and Untitled (Red, Black, White on Yellow), 1955 (also in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). These dark paintings reflected not so much a ‘darkening’ of Rothko’s mood as a deepening of feeling.

In addition to color, size was also an important factor in Rothko achieving the necessary emotional intensity that he desired. As he explained, “I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however—I think it applies to other painters I know—it is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside you experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However, you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.”

No. 7 (Dark Over Light) was first acquired by Count Alessandro Panza di Biumo, Sr. in 1961. He was the son of the legendary Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, widely considered to be one of the most important collectors of postwar American Art. Works from the elder Panza di Biumo’s holdings later formed the basis for the collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and in the 1990s, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum filled a yawning gap in its holdings when it acquired, in a combined gift and purchase arrangement, more than 300 Minimalist sculptures and paintings from the collection.

Sotheby’s Has 90 Works on Paper from Spielvogels with $40-60m Estimate for November

September 28, 2017 by Marion Maneker

Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel and Ambassador Carl Spielvogel are selling their collection of 90 works on paper (above from left to right: Magritte, Rothko, Pollock, Lichtenstein, and Johns) ranging from Degas, Matisse, Braque and Miró to Pollock, Newman, Rothko, Twombly, Lichtenstein and Freud. The entire collection is estimated at between $40 to $60m and will be sold across multiple sales:

Works featured in the Contemporary Art Evening Auction include

  • an example of Mark Rothko’s mature work, created just two years prior to his tragic death in 1970, which is estimated at $5/7 million.
  • a Pollock that shows him working through a major stylistic development in 1951 (estimate $3/4 million)
  • an incredible group of seven works by Jasper Johns that includes examples of his numbers and flag (well-timed with the current RA show + recent catalogue raisonné)
  • five drawings by Lichtenstein that correspond directly with major oils

Works featured in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale:

  • a Degas scene of three dancers from 1889 through to a 1970s Picasso nude
  • 5 works by Picasso crossing his career from 1901 to 1971, led by a scene from 1935 that foreshadows the compositional arrangement that would ultimately manifest in Guernica two years later (estimate $1.5/2.5 million)
  • a Magritte gouache at $2/3 million

Christie’s Announces Rothko No. 1, 1949 for March in London

January 16, 2017 by Marion Maneker

A photo posted by Francis Outred (@francisoutred) on Jan 16, 2017 at 8:45am PST

Francis Outred goes to his Instagram account to announce Christie’s will sell Mark Rothko’s No. 1, 1949:Continue Reading

Di Donna Opens Gallery with an Abstract Bang

October 14, 2016 by Marion Maneker

Still, Malevich, Newman  Mondrian at Di Donna Gallery
Still, Malevich, Newman Mondrian at Di Donna Gallery

A very savvy art trader, from a long line of private dealers, once said that a clear sign a work was for sale was one when a collector showed him around the house and would stop in front of particularly good piece. Without being asked, the collector would praise the picture and then add, ‘Of course, I would never sell it.’

That story comes to mind after reading Bloomberg’s nice piece promoting Emmanuel Di Donna’s show inaugurating his new gallery on Madison Avenue in New York. The show features works that are not for sale from several private collections, including a Clyfford Still painting, 1945-R, owned by Len Riggio:

“We look at it long term,” Riggio said. “I can tell you right now that my piece is not for sale.”

Continue Reading

Next Page »
LiveArt

Want to get Art Market Monitor‘s posts sent to you in our email? Sign up below by clicking on the Subscribe button.

  • About Us/ Contact
  • Podcast
  • AMMpro
  • Newsletter
  • FAQ

twitterfacebooksoundcloud
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
California Privacy Rights
Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Advertise on Art Market Monitor
 

Loading Comments...