Christie’s will offer Mark Rothko’s No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), 1964 — acquired directly from the artist’s studio in 1967 — with a guide price in the region of $80 million at its 20th Century Evening Sale on May 18 in New York, making it the single most valuable work in the Agnes Gund estate consignment and the headline Rothko of the house’s spring season.
The three-work Gund consignment is the most personally held collection to enter New York’s secondary market in the current cycle. Gund, the legendary patron and former Museum of Modern Art president who died in September 2025 at age 87, assembled the work with access that few collectors have ever had to living artists. Rothko himself recommended No. 15 — a 78 × 69.75-inch canvas of interlocked green fields divided by a red stripe, painted in the year following his Seagram Murals commission — directly to Gund at his studio. She lent it to a museum once, in the 1970s, then kept it in her living room for more than half a century. The canvas has never appeared on the secondary market.
Christie’s is presenting all three Gund works within its 20th Century Evening Sale on May 18. Alongside No. 15, the consignment includes Cy Twombly’s 1961 Untitled, estimated at $40 million to $60 million, and Joseph Cornell’s Untitled (Medici Princess), 1948, at $3 million to $5 million — a combined $123 million total estimate for all three lots.
For the asset-grade art market, the Rothko is a meaningful test. No. 15 was painted in 1964, at the center of Rothko’s darkest transitional period, when his palette shifted deliberately from the luminous oranges and reds of his late 1950s work toward denser, more compressed fields. The 1964 vintage places it within the most institutionally collected stratum of his output: a period defined by the Seagram commission’s influence and the deepening interior logic that characterizes his multiforms from this era.
Timing frames the test precisely. Sotheby’s will offer a second museum-quality Rothko — Brown and Blacks in Reds, 1957, estimated at $70 million to $100 million from the Robert Mnuchin estate — at the Mnuchin: Collector at Heart Evening Auction on May 14, four days prior. The simultaneous presence of two Rothkos at the $70–100 million tier in a single spring week is structurally rare and functionally important: two active data points at equivalent price ranges sharpen the comparable baseline for Rothko valuations across the lending, advising, and estate communities in a way that a single sale cannot.
That context extends well beyond the auction room. Postwar abstraction has faced headwinds from tariff-driven liquidity compression and shifts in certain international buying categories over the current cycle. The Rothko asset class has maintained credibility at the $70–100 million price point precisely because private holdings of this quality emerge infrequently. The Gund provenance — direct-from-artist, single-owner for 59 years, zero auction history — adds a collection-depth premium that institutional lenders and estate advisors weigh separately from hammer history.
The Twombly component of the consignment offers a secondary signal. Twombly’s 1961 canvas arrives at a moment when the artist’s chalkboard-era works have shown mixed secondary results over the 2024–2025 cycle. A $40–$60 million result for this example would recalibrate the category. Cornell’s Medici Princess — a box construction with deep provenance integrity at $3–$5 million — is among the more accessible positions in the Gund consignment for collectors and advisors tracking fine art collateral entry points.
Christie’s public exhibition preview for Marquee Week opens at Rockefeller Center beginning May 10. The 20th Century Evening Sale takes place May 18. Private viewing appointments are available through the house prior to the public preview period.
Related coverage: Sotheby’s Modern Evening Posts a $40 Million Picasso From the Donati Collection — Arlequin (Buste) 1909 Anchors a $220 Million Low Estimate on May 19 | The Mid-Season Art Market Delivers a Qualified Signal — Koons at $7.6M, Sotheby’s Curated at $19.4M, and What the Numbers Mean Ahead of May
