A superlative and early example from Lee Krasner’s seminal Earth Green series, Re-Echo (estimate $4/6 million) captures the prophetic brilliance and artistic reawakening that overtook Krasner in the months immediately following the unexpected death of her husband Jackson Pollock in August 1956. Emerging from a moment of extreme crisis and charged with immense psychic exigency, Re-Echo serves as both a testament to and catharsis of the emotional turmoil that fueled her practice at this crucial nexus – Pollock’s death marked a personal tragedy, but also an opportunity for Krasner to regain her own personal and artistic independence. Today, the Earth Green paintings are widely considered to be the most pivotal and significant paintings of the artist’s career.

A luminous and monumental canvas extending nearly 15-feet across, Royal Fireworks (estimate $2/3 million) by Helen Frankenthaler is a masterpiece from her highly acclaimed period of production in the mid-1970s. Recognizing Frankenthaler’s significant and distinct role within the American abstract vernacular, Williams set a new world auction record for the artist when she acquired the painting in 2011. With its expansive, saturated hues, Royal Fireworks from 1975 exemplifies the artist’s mature mastery of color and form in producing complex rhythmic climates on an inspiring scale.

A profoundly peaceful work, Agnes Martin’s Mountain Flowers I (estimate $2/3 million) is a superb example of the artist’s prodigious career. A simple composition with continuous horizontal lines softened by subtle inconsistencies, this 1985 work reflects Martin’s prolonged investigation into the nature of abstraction and the role of the artist, masterfully articulating a balancing act between the understated poetry of delicate mark-making and the muscular prose of modernist geometry.

CONTEMPORARY ART DAY AUCTION Auction Week of 29 June

Our Day Sale will offer a strong selection 50+ works from the collection, which continue many of the themes from the evening auction. Most especially, the sale features works by women artists working across a number of mediums and techniques – from photographs by Diane Arbus, Louise Lawler and Barbara Kruger, to a group of 13 works on paper and sculpture spanning the career of Louise Bourgeois. Ginny Williams’s interest in Minimalism is represented by works from Donald Judd and John McCracken through to Roni Horn, while Expressionist works by Philip Guston and Franz Kline complete the offering.

PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE GINNY WILLIAMS COLLECTION Auction 14 July

Ginny Williams’s collection comprised more than 1,000 photographs by the time of her passing. Sotheby’s will present a curated selection of approximately 100 photographs from the collection in a dedicated auction this July, which demonstrates Williams’s passion for the medium as well as her dedication to the work of female creators.

In addition to photographs by Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, Laura Gilpin, Margaret Bourke-White, Annie Leibovitz, and Ruth Bernhard, whose work Williams exhibited and passionately championed at her first gallery exhibition in Denver, the auction is highlighted by Tina Modotti’s Interior of Church Tower at Tepotzotlán, Mexico (estimate $200/300,000), an exceptional platinum print executed in 1924 during a visit to the Mexican town of Tepotzotlán with Edward Weston, fellow artist and her lover at the time. Modotti was particularly interested in the intersection of architecture and abstraction, and her photographs of the abandoned convent exemplify her explorations of the sculptural qualities of architectural spaces.

Photographs from The Ginny Williams Collection will feature iconic images of the early-20th century, including Edward Weston’s Dunes, Oceano (estimate $120/180,000) from 1936 and Herbert Bayer’s In Search of Times Past, a unique photomontage. Contemporary highlights include Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Fabrikhallen (estimate $80/120,000), a typology of 9 photographs from 1989, Sandy Skoglund’s Radioactive Cats (estimate $15/25,000), and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Lisa Lyon ($30/50,000), a unique large-format print exhibited in the artist’s lifetime retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sotheby’s sales of The Ginny Williams Collection will continue throughout 2020