Acquavella, Gagosian, and Pace Gallery sold a Rothko painting from Donald Marron’s collection for $70 million.
Mark Rothko, Number 22 (reds), 1957. © 2020 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / ARS, New York. Courtesy the Donald B. Marron Family Collection, Acquavella Galleries, Gagosian, and Pace Gallery.
Days after it was revealed that disgraced casino mogul Steve Wynn had spent some $105 million on a pair of Picasso paintings that belonged to the late collector Donald Marron, more sales from the valuable trove have been revealed. The three mega-galleries that beat out the world’s biggest auction houses to land the consignment of the $450-million collection—Gagosian, Pace Gallery, and Acquavella—sold Marron’s prized Mark Rothko canvas, Number 22 (reds) (1957), for around $70 million, according to Bloomberg.
That sale, along with additional works by Cy Twombly, Mark Bradford, and Gerhard Richter that have found new homes, brought the gallery triumverate’s total tally from the unprecedented consignment to about $300 million—the same sum Marron’s heirs were reportedly offered by Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips.
The $70-million Rothko painting was previously owned by the legendary contemporary art collectors Ethel and Robert Scull. When submitting proposals for handling the Marron estate, auction houses reportedly placed the high value estimate of the work at $80 million. The auction record for a work by Rothko was set at a Christie’s sale in 2012, when Orange, Red, Yellow (1961) sold for $86.8 million.