newsfromsothebys201011

Sotheby's November 2010 Contemporary Art Evening Sale Totals US$222,454,500 / £138,067,589 / €160,103,711

***OVER HIGH ESTIMATE***

Andy WARHOL (1928-1987)

Coca-Cola [4] [Large Coca-Cola], signed and dated 62 on the reverse
Acrylic, pencil and Letraset on canvas, 207.6x114.1cm

Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium US$35,362,500 (£21,947,927) (€25,450,901) (Sotheby's NY, November 9th 2010, Lot 12)
Estimate US$20,000,000-25,000,000
Lot Sold Private

Mark ROTHKO (1928-1987)

Untitled, signed and dated 1955 on the reverse
Oil on canvas, 232.7x175.3cm

Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium US$22,482,500 (£13,953,885) (€16,180,979) (Sotheby's NY, November 9th 2010, Lot 21)
Estimate US$20,000,000-2305,000,000
Lot Sold Asian Private

Exemplifying Mark Rothko's legendary language of abstraction via the sublime aura of its golden surfaces, Untitled of 1955 affords a visual and somatic experience beyond compare. Executed at the height of the artist's creative powers, it is archetypal of his very best painting. Following the crucial turning point of 1949-50, when he resolved his inimitable dialect of abstraction out of the preceding multiform paintings, Rothko entered what David Anfam calls the anni mirabilis: the first half of the 1950s during which his mature mode of artistic expression pioneered unprecedented territory. Untitled of 1955 embodies a pinnacle of achievement during this classic period and crystallizes the conceptual and philosophical enquiries interrogated by Rothko during the preceding decade. Indeed, this vast painting stands as definitive verification of Rothko's vital role in shaping the course of twentieth-century Art History, and is also intrinsic to the international artistic revolution of the post-War epoch.

At over 90 inches in height, the scale of Untitled is monumental, broadcasting its allure on a greater-than human register, engulfing the viewer's experience, and situating us as actors within its epic drama. This apparent paradox typifies the artist's ambition, declared in 1951: "I paint very large pictures...precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience...However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command" (Exh. Cat., London, The Tate Gallery, Mark Rothko 1903-1970, 1987, p. 85). Of course, scale is fundamental to the nature of Rothko's work, identified as such by Clement Greenberg in the year of this painting: "their surfaces exhale color with an enveloping effect that is enhanced by size itself. One reacts to an environment as much as to a picture hung on a wall" (in "'American-Type' Painting", 1955 cited in Clifford Ross, Ed., Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, New York, 1990, p. 248). In the preceding year Rothko had written to instruct the hanging of an exhibition: "Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale" (Exh. Cat., London, The Tate Gallery, Op Cit, p. 58). Indeed, describing "Rothko's desire to envelop the spectator with art that overcame its ambient space", Anfam cites a 1955 show at the Sidney Janis gallery where "the stature of the pictures and their siting wedged into the spaces is instructive. They seek to displace their environment" (David Anfam, Mark Rothko, The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 73). In this manner and in keeping with the most revered works of his canon, Untitled creates its own exclusive province of inimitable sensation for the viewer to enter. Nevertheless, even within Rothko's output the present work remains extremely rare: each of the four paintings executed in 1955 to exceed or equal the height of Untitled are today housed in prestigious museum collections; respectively the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; and the San Francisco Museum of Art. [...]