“You’re Selling My Picture for How Much….?”
The Abstract Expressionist painters were a moody lot. Jackson Pollock had a penchant for belting back prodigious amounts of liquor and then brawling. Willem de Kooning, no slouch himself in the juice department, womanized and shared gutters with Bowery bums. Arshile Gorky was a stormy, temperamental loner. And Mark Rothko? He had a rep for being needy, insecure, easily peeved. So with prices for his work and those of his New York School cohorts climbing a stairway to heaven over the last two years, I wonder how the prickly artist would’ve reacted to the news of David Rockefeller selling one of his key pictures for a cool $40 million-plus.
Especially given that he bought it for less than $10,000 in 1960.
So, will Rockefeller wannabes drive the price into the Stevie Cohen stratosphere?
The picture, entitled White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), has all the right stuff. It hails from 1950, a seminal year in the artist’s development. It’s big—seven feet tall—with glowing, deeply saturated areas of orange and pink (all the better for someone’s Palm Beach manse), buffered by a brooding block of white. And then there’s that intensely blue-blooded provenance. Standard Oil scion David Rockefeller, who has reportedly hung the picture in his office nigh all these decades, is the Museum of Modern Art’s most venerable patron, having recently pledged a whopping $100 million to its endowment. His mother was its founder. In fact, he gave the museum first right of refusal, but curator John Elderfield demurred, saying they’ve got five great Rothkos already. No wonder Sotheby’s, which is highlighting the picture in its May sale, estimated its worth at $40 million-plus, nearly double the artist’s 2005 auction record of $22.4 million.
One interesting thing to watch: While public Ab Ex price records currently hover between $20 million and $30 million (for Rothko, de Kooning, Clyfford Still and David Smith), a few private sales have topped $100 million in the last six months: namely a Jackson Pollock and a de Kooning that hedge fund guru Steven Cohen cherry-picked out of David Geffen’s splendiferous collection. I’m curious whether any other big dogs will rise to that aberrational level while trying to prove that they can play in Stevie’s sandbox. Or will the price stay closer to $50 million? Dare I say that a Rockefeller provenance trumps a Geffen provenance….
