Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 14 November 2019

This November, Sotheby's will offer Blue Over Red in the Contemporary Art Evening Auction with an estimate of $25 – 35 million. The painting will be on public view in Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries beginning 1 November. 

For Mark Rothko, the first half of the 1950s proved critical. It was during this period that the artist began embracing pure color as a vehicle to an emotional experience, a pioneering approach which ultimately became his signature style of abstraction. Blue Over Red, completed in 1953, marks the apex of this crucial era. Testifying to the importance of this year in Rothko’s career, half of the 16 paintings the artist executed in 1953 reside in permanent museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Legendary dealer and collector Harold Diamond acquired Blue Over Red directly from the artist in 1957. Diamond owned seven Rothko paintings during his life, three of which are now in prestigious museum collections: one in the Addison Gallery of American Art, one in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and one in the Ho-Am Art Museum in Seoul. Subsequently, Blue Over Red 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.

Executed in a richly saturated palette of orange, red and yellow, dramatically offset by one luminous blue band, Blue Over Red exemplifies the signature radiance of Rothko’s works. Featuring sumptuous color and blazing light, the work represents the summation of the artist’s deeply philosophical practice. Although the painting comprises overwhelmingly blazing hues, the blue asserts itself intensely, existing ‘over’ the fields of red and orange.

Sotheby’s has announced that it will offer Francis Bacon’s Pope on behalf of the Brooklyn Museum this November in New York. Proceeds from the sale will be used to support the museum collection. 

Executed during a particularly turbulent and emotional moment of Bacon’s life, Pope offers a rare glimpse into the psychology of the artist and the influences behind the works he created during a passionate yet volatile love affair with Peter Lacy. In the mid-1950s, Lacy moved to Tangier, prompting Bacon to make frequent and extended trips to Morocco to spend time with his lover, among a group of important creative figures such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. 

Perceived as exotic and more tolerant of homosexuality, the Tangier lifestyle offered an escapism that was liberating for both Bacon and Lacy. 

Despite this, their romance ultimately devolved into violence, which characterized a period of great psychological angst for the artist. Bacon was particularly prolific during his stints in Morocco. However, he ultimately destroyed the majority of the paintings he created in Tangier – perhaps as a way to separate himself completely from the memory of his calamitous relationship with Lacy.

The present Pope is one of only six Tangier Paintings that survive, five of which Bacon gifted to his friend Nicolas Brusilowski in 1959, hoping that he may be able to reuse the canvases. Brusilowski instead preserved these works, which later made their way into notable private collections worldwide. The sixth work now resides in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. 

Brusilowski sold the present Pope to legendary Swiss dealer Jan Krugier, and the work was subsequently acquired from his Galerie Krugier et cie in Geneva by American collector Olga H. Knoepke in 1967. In addition to her significant holdings of art, including works by such masters as Edward Hopper, George Tooker and Lucian Freud, Knoepke was a pioneering businesswoman, who helped found a plastics factory in Brooklyn, New York. She gifted the work during her lifetime to the Brooklyn Museum in 1981, where it has resided until present. 

Prior to Sotheby’s November auction, only two of the six surviving Tangier Paintings have ever appeared at auction. The most recent – another Pope – was sold at Sotheby’s Paris in 2008, for $7.3 million (estimate $3.2/4.7 million).

The full group of Tangier Paintings is included in the authoritative catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon’s work, edited by Martin Harrison and published in 2016.

 

The present work arrives at auction this November following Sotheby’s sale of another outstanding example of Bacon’s Popes, Study for a Head, which achieved $50.4 million in our Contemporary Art Evening Auction in May 2019. 

Pope will be exhibited publicly in Sotheby’s New York galleries beginning 1 November. The painting is estimated to sell for $6/8 million in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 14 November 2019.