Sotheby's announces the second part of the Macklowe Collection
Gerhard Richter - Seestuck - 1971Mark Rothko - Untitled - 1960
Following the successful auction last November, in which all the works on offer found a buyer, Sotheby's will organise the second part of the Macklowe Collection auction next May.
Images: Gerhard Richter, Seestück (Seascape), 1975 ·· Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1960
The second part of the Macklowe Collection auction will include some 30 post-war and contemporary artworks, many of them created by several artists already included in last November's sale, such as Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richer. According to Sotheby's, these are "artworks from different, but equally important, moments that act as critical counterpoints to their November counterparts".
Indeed, the works announced for auction in May include a number of important artists, but, unlike last November's auction, masterpieces are virtually absent.
Take the painting with the highest pre-sale valuation: "Untitled" (1960) is a Rothko of some importance, but a far cry from the relevance and even the vibrant beauty of "No. 7", the Rothko painting sold (with some controversy, by the way) for $82.5 million last November. Similarly, Alberto Giacometti's "Diego sur stèle II" (1958) is many steps below the importance of "Le Nez", the sculpture by the same artist sold in November for $78.4 million.
Perhaps the painting that comes closest to deserving the label of "masterpiece" is “Seestück” (Seascape), a monumental (2 x 3 metres), photorealistic seascape (or would it be more accurate to say "airscape"?) by Gerhard Richter, which Sotheby's defines as "evocative of the Romantic and sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable’s famous cloud studies, and the atmospheric light effects of Turner". The spectacular work has an presale estimate of between $25 million and $35 million.
Andy Warhol, whose "Sixteen Jackies" fetched $33.8 million last November against a pre-sale estimate of $15-20 million, will be represented by a "Self Portrait" painted in 1986, which shares the presale estimate with "Sixteen Jackies". Simple but vibrant, "Untitled", an abstraction painted by Willem de Kooning in 1961 (a strange period in the artist's career, his sublime abstractions of the 1950s having died out, but the lyricism of his later works not yet appearing) has a presale estimate of $7-10 million.

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