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A major Mark Rothko painting from the collection of the late New York financier and dealer Robert Mnuchin hammered at $74 million at Sotheby’s New York on Thursday night. With fees, it totaled $85.8 million. It’s the second-highest price ever achieved for the artist at auction.
Auctioneer Oliver Barker opened the lot at $65 million, and two bidders dueled for the work for about four minutes. At around $74 million, a phone went off in the room. “Is that a new bid coming in?” Barker joked, maybe a tad hopeful. In the end, a phone bidder on the line with Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, won the painting.
Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957), estimated at $70 million to $100 million, was offered in an 11-lot sale dedicated to material from Mnuchin’s collection, ahead of the auction house’s main “The Now” and contemporary art evening auction. The investment banker-turned-gallerist died in December at 92.
The Mnuchin sale also featured works by other modern and postwar greats that he championed, including Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso, and Franz Kline.
A second Rothko, No. 1 (1949), sold for $20.8 million against a $15 million–$20 million estimate. All the lots were backed by a guarantee, meaning they were sure to sell.
The Mnuchin sale brought in $166.3 million with fees, within its $125 million–$178 million estimate range. (Final sale prices include buyer’s fees unless otherwise noted, while estimates do not.) The main contemporary art evening auction totaled $266.8 million, bringing the night’s haul to about $433.1 million. That’s roughly 130 percent more than the same sales last May.
Four works went unsold, and one—Alice Neel’s Timothy Collins (1971)—was withdrawn mid-auction, yielding a 91 percent sell-through rate.
Oliver Barker sell’s Mark Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957) on May 14, 2026. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
After the sale, David Galperin, the house’s vice chair and head of contemporary art, said that the market is “discerning but excitable.”
Some may have been hoping for more bidding on that Rothko, which is a towering eight feet tall, but there are a limited number of clients who are willing and able to bid on a work of that size and price, and the artist’s market has been relatively quiet in recent years. Galperin noted that only a handful of large Rothkos have come to auction in recent years, and none has exceeded $70 million.
Brown and Blacks in Reds was painted during Rothko’s defining decade, when he developed the stacked fields of color that came to characterize his work. The auction house said that the canvas is one of 15 large-scale works the artist painted in 1957, most of which are now in museums. His red paintings are especially popular among collectors.
The work has an impressive provenance. It once belonged to the liquor empire Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, and its dark, moody palette foreshadowed Rothko’s iconic Seagram Murals, a celebrated 30-painting commission for the Seagram Building‘s restaurant in 1958 that the artist famously canceled due to his objections to the venue’s wealthy clientele.
Rothko’s auction record was set in 2012, when Orange, Red, Yellow (1961) sold at Christie’s New York for $86.8 million, more than doubling its low estimate, according to the Artnet Price Database. Accounting for inflation, that would be around $125.9 million today.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), 1983. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Other highlights from the night included Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) from 1983, which hammered for $45.3 million ($52.7 million with fees). The work last sold at auction for $14.5 million in 2013 at Christie’s London. Rachel Rosan, valuations expert and director of Rosan Art Valuations for Cromwell Art, said that bidding was thinner than she expected. “It was a bargain.”
A bright-green Andy Warhol‘s Brigitte Bardot (1974) made its auction debut, selling for $24.8 million, with more than five bidders chasing it for nearly five minutes. The work set a record for the series of eight paintings of Bardot commissioned by Gunter Sachs, Bardot’s husband from 1966 to 1969. “It was great to see such active bidding on it,” Rosan said. “The health of Warhol market is a like a little barometer for the overall market, to an extent, at least when it comes to the public’s perception.”
Helen Frankenthaler, Cape Orange (1964). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Rosan also noted the strong $7.3 million result for Helen Frankenthaler‘s Cape Orange (1964)—the second-highest price for the artist at auction. (Sotheby’s set the artist’s record in 2020 with the $7.8 million sale of the 1975 canvas Royal Fireworks.) “It’s such a beautiful painting and went for a good price,” Rosan said, although she mentioned that, despite being similar in scale and palette to Mnuchin’s Rothko, the price differential remains great between male and female artists. “Could we see a Frankenthaler go for $70 million one day?” she asked. “Maybe.”
The sales at Sotheby’s on Thursday evening kicked off New York’s marquee May auctions, which will see between $1.8 billion and $2.6 billion worth of art sold across the big three auction houses over the next week. Mnuchin’s monumental Rothko was one of three works estimated to sell for up to $100 million.
Artnet’s “By the Numbers” breakdown of the sale will follow on Friday.
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