Mark Rothko’s Untitled (No. 11) is going up for sale at Christie’s in New York next month. The painting has been featured prominently in major museum retrospectives including a seminal exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, organized by Jermayne MacAgy in 1957, the same year the painting was created.
Untitled (No. 11) is expected to fetch $25-35 million, which is seen by many as a sign of a very healthy art auction market. Christie’s took a little Rothko breather since last May when it sold Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow for $86.8 million, setting a record for any contemporary artwork at auction. To get a sense of the surrealism of such an event, check out Christie’s video of that sale (and notice how quickly the bidding and camerawork shifts from the room at large to the little box of folks on phones).
