Mark Rothko - No 1. Royal Red and Blue 1954
No 1. Royal Red and Blue 1954
288x171cm oil/canvas
Sold for: USD 75.1 million
Auction house: Sotheby's, New York
Sale date: 13 November 2012
Seller: John and Anne Marion
Buyer: Anonymous buyer
From Sotheby's:
No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue) was the ultimate crescendo of Rothko’s first one-man exhibition in a major US museum, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. The show was organized by one of the foremost champions of the avant-garde in post-war America, and the Institute’s first curator of modern painting and sculpture; the visionary Katherine Kuh. Every other work from that renowned event is now housed in a major institutional collection, except No. 6 (Yellow, White, Blue over Yellow on Gray), which broke the auction record for the artist when it was sold by Sotheby’s in 2004.