NEW YORK, 30 October 2019 – Sotheby’s is pleased to share highlights from our Contemporary Art Evening Auction in New York on 14 November 2019. The auction is anchored by a strong group of Abstract Expressionist works by artists such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Clyfford Still, as well as a particularly robust offering of important pieces by American artists including Wayne Thiebaud, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Brice Marden.

The 51 lots on offer will open for public view on 1 November in Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries, alongside the Contemporary Art Day Auction as well as our November sales of Impressionist & Modern Art.

EVENING AUCTION HIGHLIGHTS

WILLEM DE KOONING’S UNTITLED XXII
Executed at a critical moment in Willem de Kooning’s career, Untitled XXII from 1977 represents the apex of the artist’s mature output (estimate $25/35 million). Exhausted by the noise and tension of life in Manhattan during the early part of his career, de Kooning spent summers in East Hampton beginning in 1959, and permanently moved to Springs in 1963 to immerse himself in the light-filled, tranquil environment. Although Untitled XXII remains abstract, it evokes the essence, memories, and experience of de Kooning’s oceanic and peaceful surroundings which captivated the artist, reminding him of his childhood home in Holland. Marking the artist’s return to painting after a hiatus focused on drawing and sculpture, Untitled XXII is part of an explosive outpouring of creativity that produced an illustrious body of large-scale, color-drenched canvases that rank among the most iconic achievements of de Kooning’s career.

MARK ROTHKO’S BLUE OVER RED

Blue Over Red represents the first work from Mark Rothko’s critical year of 1953 to appear at auction in over a decade (estimate $25/35 million). The painting a critical period of development in the first half of the 1950s, immediately following his move to a new studio down the street from MoMA where he painted some of his most revolutionary explorations of color. Blue Over Red was acquired directly from the artist in 1957 by legendary dealer and collector Harold Diamond, and subsequently spent decades with Baltimore collectors Israel and Selma Rosen, who offered the work at auction in 2005, when it sold for $5.6 million. It has remained in the same private collection since 2007. Separate release available

CLYFFORD STILL’S PH-399
A quintessential masterwork of Abstract Expressionism, Clyfford Still’s PH-399 demonstrates the radical innovation of Still’s visionary oeuvre (estimate $12/18 million). Painted in 1946 – the same year as the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York – the present work is a seminal early touchstone of Still’s practice. PH-399 marks not only the realization of Still’s signature style, but also the true inauguration of Abstract Expressionism – over the course of 1946, Mark Rothko would receive his first solo museum exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Jackson Pollock’s paintings would appear in the Whitney Museum’s Annual Exhibition in New York for the first time, and art critic Robert Coates would formally coin the term ‘Abstract Expressionism’ in The New Yorker as a means of describing the new movement that would, over the next several years, emerge as the predominant artistic mode of the New York school and larger art world.

In further testament to the significance of the present work, PH-399 was selected by Still himself for inclusion in his seminal 1959 exhibition Paintings by Clyfford Still, organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Personally curated by the artist, this exhibition was Still’s first large-scale survey, and remains among the most important exhibitions of his career. When asked to pose for a photograph within the exhibition, Still chose to stand before PH-399, cementing its status as a singularly iconic representation not only of his own celebrated output, but within the mythic narrative and development of postwar painting.

BRICE MARDEN’S MULTI-PANEL MONOCHROME PAINTINGS
Measuring nine feet across, Number Two is a monumental ode to Brice Marden’s most advanced explorations of form and color (estimate $10/15 million). The work belongs to a limited and pivotal body of the artist’s multi-panel monochrome paintings – so called because the arrangement of their composite panels echoes that of a post- and-lintel system of architecture, first devised by the ancient Greeks. Number Two is further distinguished as part of a suite of just four twelve-part post-and-lintel construction paintings executed between 1983 and 1984, which were first exhibited together in a critically acclaimed exhibition at the Pace Gallery in 1984. The present example has remained in the same private collection since it was acquired from Pace in 1985, and its sister painting – Number One – resides in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Defined by a compositional complexity and ambition of scale unprecedented in Marden’s output up to that date, these paintings remain amongst the most visually compelling and conceptually ambitious of Marden’s entire body of work.