Sotheby's NY / Contemporary Art Evening Auction - 13 Nov 2012
On 13 November 2012, Sotheby’s New York will present its biannual Contemporary Art Evening Auction. The sale will be led by prime examples by the key artists of the American Abstract Expressionist movement including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, among others. The auction will also include one of the most elegant and fully resolved of Gerhard Richter’s abstraction paintings, one of Francis Bacon’s iconic Pope Paintings, as well as a selection of important works by Andy Warhol. Highlights will be on view in New York beginning 1 November.
The November auction will be led by a seminal, large-scale masterpiece by Mark Rothko. No.1 (Royal Red and Blue) was painted in 1954, a time considered by many to be the zenith of the artist's creative powers (right, est. $35/50 million*). The majestic canvas was one of eight works hand-selected by Rothko for his landmark solo show of the same year at the Art Institute of Chicago. Measuring 113¾ x 67½ in (288.9 x 171.5 cm), No.1 (Royal Red and Blue) has remained in the same collection for 30 years.
The sale will also include eight 20th century masterworks from part of the extensive collection of Sidney and Dorothy Kohl. Acquired predominantly in the early 1970s, the offering features prime examples by the titans of the American Abstract Expressionist movement - Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Joan Mitchell, Hans Hofmann and Adolph Gottlieb. The offering is led by Number 4, 1951, an exceedingly rare drip painting on canvas by Jackson Pollock (left, est. $25/35 million) and Clyfford Still’s masterful 1948-H, which defines the critical moment in the artist’s career when his incomparable abstract dialect achieved its fully resolved expression (est. $15/20 million). Also from the Kohl Collection is Willem de Kooning’s sublime Abstraction, which was executed circa 1949, soon after the artist’s first solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948 (est. $15/20 million).
Abstraktes Bild (712) is one of the most elegant and fully resolved abstractions by Gerhard Richter ever to appear at auction (right, est. in excess of $16 million). Its sale follows the remarkable price of $34.2 million (£21.3 million) achieved for Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (809-4) on 12 October at Sotheby’s London, which established the world record for a work by Gerhard Richter, as well as a new benchmark for the work of any living artist at auction. Abstraktes Bild (712) from 1990 was painted at a crucial moment in the artist’s career and epitomizes his mastery of the art of abstraction. Also by Richter are two paintings entitled I.G.(est. $3/4 million each). The portraits were painted in 1993 towards the end of the artist’s marriage to Isa Genzken and address the private and complex relationship between the painter and his subject who is seen as if at the point of departing.
A further highlight of the sale is one of the most important versions of Francis Bacon’s iconic Pope Paintings ever to have appeared at auction, Untitled (Pope) (left, est. $18/25 million). The vision of screaming Popes emerged from the desolate shadows of the Second World War as humanity tried to make sense of the horrors that had been committed during those years. This version was painted circa 1954 and is closely related to the artist’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, the seminal masterpiece that is now housed in the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. Untitled (Pope) has been in the same private collection since a 1975 auction at Sotheby’s London.
Also by Bacon is the 1967 portrait Study For Head Of Isabel Rawsthorne from the Estate of George Embiricos (est. $9/12 million). The work is a deeply personal portrayal of one of Bacon’s closest female friends and is both a testament to the pair’s close companionship and a breathtaking example of the artist’s rendering of the human form at the threshold between abstraction and figuration.
Leading the group of important works by Andy Warhol is Troy, a 1962 portrait depicting Troy Donahue, the American heartthrob of the 1950s and 60s (est. $15/20 million). Warhol created Troy in August 1962, just before the famed Marilyn paintings which followed later that same year, and the series strikingly anticipates the artist’s overwhelming preoccupation with fame, stardom and movie celebrities. Of the ten canvases Warhol screened of Troy, only three are large in scale and the most majestic examples of the group are theTroy Diptych in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the present painting. This work represents the very inception of Warhol’s fixation with the power and allure of celebrity and is an early Pop Art archetype.
The sale will also include two works from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series: Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice), executed in January - February 1963 (right, est. in the region of $12 million), and Suicidefrom 1962/ 64 (est. $6/8 million). Identified as one of the very first of the artist’s “car crash” paintings, Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice) is an historic paradigm of Pop Art from the heart of a breathtaking moment in twentieth-century Art History. This work's execution in January - February 1963 belongs to an extraordinary shift in this most iconic of artistic careers, during which Warhol revolutionized the terms of popular visual culture. The ideal of the seminal Death and Disaster series, which was one of the most provocative, confrontational and brilliant projects undertaken by any artist in the transformative decade of the 1960s, this canvas epitomizes the monumental themes of Warhol’s career: namely an unprecedented artistic interrogation into the agencies of mass-media, celebrity and death.
Warhol is believed to have created his first Suicide silkscreen on paper in 1962, and 1964, a very small number of additional versions, including an example on offer in the November auction (est. $6/8 million). The incredible tonal range, raw imagery, and intense subject matter of Suicide generate an extraordinary impact on the viewer and make the work a resonant example of his Death and Disaster series. In 2007, Sotheby’s sold another unique example of the silkscreen, also executed in 1964, which set the current record for a work on paper by Warhol at $5,193,000.
The November auction also includes two further unique works on paper by Warhol: The Kiss (Bela Lugosi)from 1963 (est. $4.5/6.5 million) and Cagney from 1964 (est. $4.5/6.5 million), both of which, in addition toSuicide, have an individuality as they demonstrate the silkscreen process at its most primitively effective – the variables in ink and the action of the screening itself.
More Contemporary artists represented in the November auction include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, John Currin and Glenn Brown among others. A selection of works by Basquiat is led by Onion Gum from 1983, an authoritative example of the then-23 year old artist’s unique brand of gestural mark making (left, est. $7/9 million). Murakami’s The Castle of Tin Tin multiplies his celebrated subject DOB in an amorphous, swirling spiral stretch over an enormous double-panel silver surface reaching nearly ten feet by ten feet (est. $4/6 million). And two works by Glenn Brown on offer from the collection of Marcel Brient include Towards an International Socialism (after “Icebergs in Space” 1989 by Chris Foss)(est. $3.5/4.5 million), a sweeping, hyper-realist vision of alien space that is one of the artist’s most important works and follows the record-breaking result of $8,110,651 achieved by Sotheby’s in London for The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dalà (after John Martin) in June.
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