Second part of the Macklowe Collection fetches $246 million at Sotheby’s

The second part of the auction of the Macklowe Collection achieved a total of $246 million at Sotheby’s, which -together with the $676 million achieved by the first part- makes the collection one of the most expensive art collections ever sold.

By G. Fernández · theartwolf.com · Images: Mark Rothko, “Untitled”, 1960 ·· Gerhard Richter, “Seestück (Seascape)”, 1975

The total of $922 million exceeds -nominally- the $835 million achieved by the Rockefeller collection at Christie’s in 2018, but -accounting for inflation- the Rockefeller collection remains the most expensive art collection ever auctioned.

The highest price of the auction was -unsurprisingly- achieved by the painting with the highest pre-sale valuation: “Untitled” (1960) is a Rothko of some importance, but a far cry from the relevance and even the vibrant beauty of “No. 7“, the Rothko sold (with some controversy, by the way) for $82.5 million last November. “Untitled” achieved $48 million, close to its most optimistic pre-sale estimate. The result achieved is objectively positive, considering that two other Rothkos of similar date and size, albeit in brighter colours (which is usually an advantage in the market), were sold last week at Christie’s.

“Seestück” (Seascape), is a monumental (2 x 3 metres), photorealistic seascape (or would it be more accurate to say “airscape”?) by Gerhard Richter, which Sotheby’s defined as “evocative of the Romantic and sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable’s famous cloud studies, and the atmospheric light effects of Turner“. The painting sold for $30.2 million, in line with its pre-sale estimate, and the highest price paid at auction for a photorealist work by Richter after the $37.1 million paid in 2013 for “Domplatz, Mailand [Cathedral Square, Milan].“

Andy Warhol, whose “Sixteen Jackies” fetched $33.8 million last November against a pre-sale estimate of $15-20 million, was represented by a “Self Portrait” painted in 1986, which shared the presale estimate with “Sixteen Jackies“. The painting sold for $18.7 million to an Asian buyer. Simple but vibrant, “Untitled“, an abstraction painted by Willem de Kooning in 1961 (a strange period in the artist’s career, his sublime abstractions of the 1950s having died out but the lyricism of his later works not yet appearing) fetched $17.8 million, well above its pre-sale estimate of $7-10 million.

Among the auction successes, Agnes Martin‘s “Early Morning Happiness” fetched $9.8 million and Roy Lichtenstein‘s “Mirror #9” fetched $6.1 million, in both cases about four times their most conservative pre-sale estimates.