A red-and-black Mark Rothko canvas from the collection of financier‑turned‑dealer Robert Mnuchin sold for US$85.8 million at Sotheby’s New York on Thursday (14 May), coming within a hair of the artist’s auction record to become his second‑most expensive work ever sold. The record stands at US$86.8 million, set by Orange, Red, Yellow (1961) at Christie’s New York in 2012.
Once installed in the iconic Seagram Building, Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957) was the star lot of New York’s spring auctions. It drew two interested buyers before the hammer fell at US$74 million. The winning bid was placed by Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and Impressionist and Modern Art worldwide, on behalf of a telephone client bidding with paddle number 67.
Estimated at US$70 million to US$100 million, the Rothko was offered in Sotheby’s 11-lot evening sale dedicated to Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner and influential gallerist known for championing Abstract Expressionism – and for winning Jeff Koons' Rabbit for a record US$91.1 million in 2019. All but one lot carried a third-party guarantee before the sale, and every work found a buyer, bringing the total to US$166.3 million.
Auctioneer Oliver Barker hammered down Mark Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957) at US$74 million
Lot 5 | Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970) | Brown and Blacks in Reds, oil on canvas | Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart
Executed in 1957
229.9 x 154 cm
Provenance:
- Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
- The Seagram Collection, New York (acquired from the above circa 1957)
- Christie's New York, 14 May 2003, lot 35 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: US$70,000,000 - 100,000,000
Hammer Price: US$74,000,000
Sold: US$85,780,000
Brown and Blacks in Reds was first owned by Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, the Canadian-founded distiller, which acquired the work from Sidney Janis Gallery in New York and displayed it in the lobby of its Park Avenue headquarters, the Seagram Building. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, two key figures in 20th-century architecture, the bronze-and-glass tower opened in 1958 and became a landmark of postwar corporate modernism.
The painting was the only Rothko to hang in the lobby, and its installation helped prompt the commission for the famed Seagram Murals, a group of dark red, maroon, and black paintings conceived for the Four Seasons restaurant on the building’s ground floor.
Although Rothko accepted the prestigious commission, he was deeply hostile to the elite culture it represented from the start. “I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room,” he declared. He went on to produce some 30 mural-scale canvases, deliberately adopting a more sombre palette of reds, maroons, and blacks.
After visiting the completed restaurant, however, Rothko became convinced that the paintings would be reduced to high-end décor. He eventually cancelled the commission, returned the US$35,000 fee, and kept the canvases in storage. Nine were later given to Tate in London; other examples are now held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the DIC Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in Japan.
The present work installed in the lobby of the Seagram building
Mark Rothko at Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2024 | (left) the present work; (middle) one of the Seagram Murals
“I'm not an abstractionist,” Rothko once said. “I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”
After moving away from Surrealist and Symbolist imagery in the 1940s, Rothko abandoned figuration in search of a more universal language for human experience. He aimed, as he put it, for “the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea,” and arrived at the hovering planes of colour that would become his hallmark.
Through these fields of colour, the artist sought to create immersive encounters capable of eliciting deeply personal, emotional, and subjective responses. When a visitor once praised a painting in shades of burgundy, plum, and black, Rothko recalled that another viewer had rejected it earlier that day, asking instead for “a happy painting” in red, orange, or yellow. Rothko replied: “Red, orange, yellow – isn’t that the color of an inferno?”
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko | Orange, Red, Yellow (1961) | Sold: US$86,882,500, Christie's New York, 2021 (Auction record for the artist
By 1957, the year Brown and Blacks in Reds was painted, Rothko had fully developed the format that would define his mature career, and for the first time could earn a living from his work alone. He executed thirty‑seven paintings that year, only 15 of them on a comparable scale, measuring more than 90 inches high.
Within that group, Rothko created three paintings in this palette of reds and blacks. The other two examples now belong to institutional collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art and Tate, London.
Mnuchin acquired Brown and Blacks in Reds for US$6.7 million in 2003, when Vivendi, which had purchased Seagram in 2001, consigned it to Christie’s. That same night, he also bought the larger No. 9 (White and Black on Wine) (1958), which fetched US$16.3 million and set a new auction record for Rothko.
The present work has appeared in most of the artist’s seminal exhibitions, from the 1978-79 traveling retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Rothko survey at Tate in London to the recent show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
Mark Rothko | Black Over Reds (1957) | Collection of Baltimore Museum of Art
Mark Rothko | Light Red Over Black (1957) | Collection of Tate, London
Lot 8 | Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970) | No. 1, oil on canvas | Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart
Executed in 1949
198.8 x 98.1 cm
Provenance (Supplemented by The Value):
- Estate of the artist
- Kate Rothko Prizel and Christoper Rothko, New York (acquired from the above in 1988)
- Private collection, New York
- L & M Arts, New York
- Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2008)
- Christie's London, 7 March 2017, lot 11 (consigned by the above) (Sold: £10,693,000)
- Private Collection, New York (acquired at the above sale)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: US$15,000,000 - 20,000,000
Hammer Price: US$17,500,000
Sold: US$20,805,000
A second Rothko in the Mnuchin sale, No. 1 (1949), set an auction record for the artist’s so-called Multiform series, selling for US$20.8 million with fees.
Opened at US$11 million, the lot drew three bidders before hammering at US$17.5 million to a telephone client represented by Simon Shaw, co-head of Impressionist and Modern Art worldwide. The result surpassed the previous high set in March, when Sotheby’s Hong Kong sold No. 10 from the same year for around HK$66.8 million (US$8.5 million).
Rothko’s early figurative paintings often centred on solitary figures in stark urban settings, before he turned in the early 1940s to myth, Surrealism, and biomorphic imagery as a way of addressing more existential themes. By around 1946, those figures and narratives had begun to dissolve into floating areas of colour, giving rise to the works now known as Multiforms.
Mark Rothko | No. 10 (1949) | Sold: HK$66,780,000, Sotheby's Hong Kong, 2026
Mark Rothko | Underground Fantasy (1940) | Collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC
Mark Rothko | A Last Supper (1941) | Sold: US$1.45 million, Heritage Auctions, 2022
Mark Rothko | Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944) | Collection of the Museum of Modern Art
No. 1 belongs to a crucial transitional moment, as Rothko shifted from these nebulous shapes toward the distinctive stacked rectangles that would define his mature style, and both approaches coexist in the painting.
It is also the first of the seminal group of paintings that debuted in Rothko’s January 1950 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery. The show unfolded across two galleries, with twelve works hung together in the main room and numbered 1 to 12 in the anti‑clockwise sequence he devised. Of those twelve, only three remain in private hands; the rest are now in major American museums.
Mark Rothko at his exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950; the present work is the first from the right
Robert Mnuchin and Other Highlight Lots
Robert Mnuchin (1933 - 2025) was one of the art world’s more unusual power brokers. Before becoming a leading New York dealer, he spent more than three decades at Goldman Sachs, where he rose to become a partner and member of the firm’s management committee. He was closely associated with the development of its block-trading business and was known internally as “Coach.” One of his sons, Steven Mnuchin, also worked at Goldman before moving into hedge funds and later serving as U.S. Treasury secretary during Donald Trump’s first administration.
He turned to art full-time in the early 1990s, opening C&M Arts with Los Angeles dealer James Corcoran in a converted part of his townhouse on East 78th Street. Specialising in Abstract Expressionism and postwar art, the gallery later became L&M Arts during his partnership with Dominique Lévy, and then Mnuchin Gallery after Lévy’s departure in 2013.
Mnuchin advised major collectors including Steve A. Cohen and Mitchell Rales, and became a familiar force in the auction room. In 2019, he placed the winning bid for Jeff Koons’s Rabbit at Christie’s, paying US$91.1 million with fees on behalf of Cohen, then a record for a living artist.
As collectors, Mnuchin and his wife, Adriana, developed a particular interest in abstraction, favouring artists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. They followed a simple rule: buy only works they both loved and wanted to live with. “We’ve never had anything in a warehouse,” he once said. “I don’t even like the word ‘collection.’ It sounds like stamps.”
Robert Mnuchin
Lot 7 | Jeff Koons (b. 1955) | Louis XIV, stainless steel | Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart
Executed in 1986, this work is the artist's proof from an edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof
116.8 x 68.6 x 38.1 cm
Provenance:
- The artist
- Benedikt Taschen, Cologne (acquired from the above in 1993)
- Christie's New York, 13 May 2015, lot 58B (consigned by the above)
- Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: US$7,000,000 - 10,000,000
Hammer Price: US$8,000,000
Sold: US$8,570,000
Lot 6 | Franz Kline (1910 - 1962) | Harleman, oil on canvas | Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart
Executed in 1960
134.9 x 259.7 cm
Provenance:
- Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (acquired directly from the artist on 14 January 1961)
- Pauli and Melvin Hirsh, Los Angeles (acquired from the above in 1963)
- Christie’s New York, 8 November 1983, lot 10 (consigned by the above)
- Shigeki Kameyama, Tokyo (acquired at the above sale)
- PaceWildenstein, New York
- Acquired from the above in November 2003 by the present owner
Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: US$12,000,000 - 18,000,000
Hammer Price: US$12,000,000
Sold: US$14,480,000
Lot 4 | Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) | Untitled XLII, oil on canvas | Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart
Executed in 1983
203.2 x 177.8 cm
Provenance:
- The Willem de Kooning Foundation
- Private Collection, New York
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: US$9,000,000 - 12,000,000
Hammer Price: US$10,200,000
Sold: US$12,410,000
Lot 2 | Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) | Untitled, oil on paper mounted on canvas | Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart
Executed in 1970
182.9 x 108 cm
Provenance:
- William Pall Fine Art, New York
- Waddington Galleries, London
- Private Collection, USA
- Private Collection, Switzerland
- Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Zurich
- Daros Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above circa 1993)
- L & M Arts, New York
- Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above)
- Lévy Gorvy, New York
- Private Collection, San Francisco (acquired from the above)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: US$4,000,000 - 6,000,000
Hammer Price: US$8,800,000
Sold: US$10,800,000
Lot 3 | Joan Miró (1893 - 1983) | Dormeurs réveillés par un oiseau, gouache and watercolor on paper | Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart
Executed on 9 August 1939
40.6 x 33 cm
Provenance:
- Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (acquired by 1942)
- Fritz Bultman, New York
- Vivian Horan Fine Art, New York
- Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2000)
- Christie’s New York, 7 November 2012, lot 22 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: US$3,000,000 - 5,000,000
Hammer Price: US$5,200,000
Sold: US$6,464,000
Lot 9 | Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) | Two Women, oil on paper mounted on canvas | Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart
Executed in 1964
153.7 x 94 cm
Provenance:
- Joseph H. Hirshhorn III, New York (acquired directly from the artist in 1964)
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
- Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York (acquired from the above in 1982)
- Private Collection
- Private Collection, Düsseldorf
- PaceWildenstein, New York (acquired from the above)
- Acquired from the above in January 2001 by the present owner
Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: US$3,000,000 - 4,000,000
Hammer Price: US$3,200,000
Sold: US$4,024,000
Lot 1 | Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) | Deux femmes nues assises, pastel and pencil on paper
Executed on 4 April 1921
21 x 23.2 cm
Provenance:
- (probably) Richard Goetz, Paris and New York (acquired directly from the artist)
- Max Moos, Geneva and New York
- M. Knoedler & Co., New York (acquired from the above on 17 November 1945)
- Mrs. Tomás Regalado, El Salvador (acquired from the above on 16 July 1947)
- Private Collection (acquired by descent from the above)
- Christie’s London, 1 July 1998, lot 1 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: US$700,000 - 1,000,000
Hammer Price: US$1,200,000
Sold: US$
Lot 10 | David Hammons (b. 1943) | Untitled, acrylic and tarp on canvas | Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart
Executed in 2017
162.6 x 116.8 cm
Provenance:
- Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner
Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: US$800,000 - 1,200,000
Hammer Price: US$850,000
Sold: US$1,088,000
Lot 11 | John Chamberlain (1927 - 2011) | Untitled, painted metal, fabric, paper collage, metal staples, plastic and acrylic on paper mounted on board
Executed in 1961
30.5 x 43.8 x 16.5 cm
Provenance:
- Allan Stone, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
- Sotheby’s New York, 9 May 2011, lot 2 (consigned by the above)
- Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)
- Sotheby's London, 8 March 2018, lot 131 (consigned by the above)
- Lévy Gorvy, New York
- Private Collection, San Francisco (acquired from the above)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Subject to Minimum-Price Guarantee
Estimate: US$400,000 - 600,000
Hammer Price: US$300,000
Sold: US$384,000
Auction Details:
Auction House: Sotheby's New York
Sale: Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart Evening Auction
Date: 14 May 2026
Number of Lots: 11
Sold: 11
Sale Rate: 100%
Sale Total: US$166,341,000