Agnes Gund Collection Heads to Christie’s With $80M Rothko

When Agnes Gund buys Mark Rothko’s 1964 abstract painting No. 15 (two green and red stripes) In 1967, she purchased the painting directly from the artist’s studio. The painting would hang in her living room for decades. This May, the work will be offered for sale on the secondary market for the first time, becoming the highlight of a group of works highlighted by her in the Christie’s collection.

The auction house announced today that it will sell three works from the personal collection of Gund, who died last September, at its major May auction in New York, with an estimated value of about $80 million; a Rothko, estimated at about $80 million; and Cy Twombly’s 1961 Untitledestimated at $40 million to $60 million; and Joseph Cornell’s “1948” Untitled (Princess Medici)estimated at $3 million to $5 million.

The group size is small but serious. Rothko, Twombly, and Cornell were all artists who reshaped postwar art in unique ways, and these works are something Gund, MoMA’s longtime trustee and director from 1991 to 2002, carries with him, not just collects. This provenance will almost certainly increase collector interest and bidding on the piece.

Rothko is the obvious title lot. The painting was painted in 1964 and the canvas is over seven feet tall. The area of ​​dark green and indigo is anchored by a sharp reddish-orange stripe running through the lower third. Gund first saw the painting during a studio visit, and it remains one of the few Rothko paintings purchased directly from the artist that remains in private hands. Over the years it has been a mainstay in her apartment, her daily presence rather than a trophy loaned to history.

Twombly was created in Rome in 1961, during a critical period when his looping lines and bursts of paint felt new urgency. Works of similar scale and ambition are now in major museum collections. Cornell, by comparison, seems intimate. Created around 1948, the box structure layers Renaissance imagery with found materials to create one of the artist’s dreamy stage sets. Together, these three works illustrate Gund’s style as a collector, ranging from monumental abstractions to quiet, detailed assemblages.

For Christie’s, the sale comes at a time when the market is once again hungry for new listings with clean provenance. Rothko’s work has never appeared at auction. It comes from a single owner’s collection and is of institutional and emotional importance. In a season when sellers are wary and buyers are picky, this kind of story matters.

Gund is more than just a collector who seizes the moment. Born in Cleveland in 1938, she began buying art seriously in the 1960s, joining the Museum of Modern Art’s International Board of Trustees in 1967 and its Board of Trustees in 1976. She served as the museum’s director from 1991 to 2002 and donated more than 1,000 works to the museum during her lifetime and hundreds more to other institutions. In 1999, she helped bring the PS 1 Center for Contemporary Art under the MoMA umbrella and served on the newly formed MoMA PS1 Board of Directors until her death.

Long before museums began to expand their collections, Gund began acquiring works by women and artists of color and urged institutions to do the same. She spends as much time in artist studios as she does in boardrooms. For her, collecting is a personal matter.

In 2017, she made headlines beyond the art world when she sold a Roy Lichtenstein work masterpiece Raised $165 million, with approximately $100 million of the proceeds going to the Arts for Justice Fund, an initiative focused on criminal justice reform. The move redefined how some collectors viewed the power of a single painting.

The three works at Christie’s were not sold to fund a public event. Instead, they emerge as the final chapter in a collection that has reshaped museums across the country. Ahead of the May auction, Rothko and Twombly will embark on an international tour, adding a global tour to the works that once lived quietly on the walls of her Park Avenue home.