Chic for a Sheikh? Mark Rothko’s $72.8-million “White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose),” 1950
While we’re waiting for some contemporary art auction records to be set later this month, The Art Newspaper claims to know the names of big winners of auctions past. Sarah Thornton reports:
Ever since their culture minister, Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al Thani,
was arrested and investigated (and then pardoned) for alleged misuse of
public funds, the collecting clan (whose cultural assets include Al
Jazeera) has been keeping a low profile. But we can reveal that they
are now major players in the modern and contemporary market acquiring,
among other things, Mark Rothko‘s “White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose),”
otherwise known as the “Rockefeller Rothko,” which sold at Sotheby’s in
May 2007 for the world-wide record price of $72.8 million–the most expensive
post-war work of art to sell at auction ever….When “Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold)” was bought at Sotheby’s New York
for $21 million hammer price ($23.6 million with buyer’s premium) by Gagosian for
Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire with a taste for high-impact
figurative work, it…made [Jeff] Koons contemporary art’s uncontested top dog.
So Sarah, since you know so much, who bought the Guennol Lioness?
COMING SOON: AUCTIONEERS GONE WILD? UNFAIR “FAIR MARKET VALUE”