In addition, Dean is deeply involved in many charities, with a particular focus on children. He works closely with Keep a Child Alive, the charity founded by his wife, Alicia Keys, to fight AIDS and poverty in Africa, and adopted the Bronx Charter School for the Arts. He is also the Global Ambassador for the Harlem Hospital for Children and serves on the board of Children’s Rights.

ADDITIONAL AUCTION HIGHLIGHTS
Frank Stella’s Scramble: Descending Green Values/ Descending Spectrum (estimate $2/3 million) from 1978 is a remarkable embodiment of the exhilarating visual energy that characterizes the very finest of his oeuvre and boasts the highest-ever estimate for a work offered in Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated auction. Enveloping the viewer in a dazzling surge of painterly force, the present work captures Stella’s incisive intellectual rigor as applied to the very tenets of painting. Embracing pure geometric abstraction, Stella relies on mastery of color and symmetry of line to manipulate space, imbuing the two-dimensional picture plane with a complex physical dimension.

The 1970s were a crucial decade in Stella’s artistic career beginning in 1970 when, at the age of 34, Stella had his first full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and became the youngest artist ever to receive this prestigious honor.

Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 169 (estimate $1.5/2 million) is a classic example of the artist’s most acclaimed body of works and another rare addition to this season’s Contemporary Curated sale. The present work, once in the collection of Motherwell’s daughter, Lise, distills the gestural dynamism and tremendous painterly force of the artist’s monumental paintings into a more intimate and poignant format. Motherwell painted his first Elegy composition in 1948 to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg titled Elegy to the Spanish Republic I, and continued exploring this series in depth over the course of his career. This work is magnificently distinguished by the incorporation of rosy pink hues. Seeping out from beneath the stoic black slabs and executed in quick, gestural strokes, these delicate blush tones conjure an image of faded blood, a dying life force, or alternatively breathe life into the otherwise monochromatic canvas.