No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue)
No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue) is a painting by Mark Rothko .
| No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue) |
|---|
| Mark Rothko , 1954 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 288.9 x 171.5 cm |
| Private collection
Link to the picture |
The picture, which Sotheby’s auctioned to a telephone bidder for $ 75.1 million in 2012 , is one of Rothko’s three pictures, Orange, Red, Yellow and White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) , which opened between 2007 and 2012 Auctions have fetched peak prices between $ 72.8 million and $ 86 million. No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue) is the first of a series of eight pictures shown in a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954 .
history
The exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago was Rothko's first solo show in one of the major US museums of contemporary art. The exhibition, entitled Recent Paintings by Mark Rothko , was curated by Katherine Kuh (1904–1994) and was shown from October 1954 to February 1955. The pictures were named numerically from 1 to 8 with the addition of the dominant colors in brackets. Rothko himself, who also determined the color of the walls, had selected the pictures for the exhibition and was involved in the hanging.
Four of the images shown in the exhibition are now in public museums, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art , the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao , the Phillips Collection in Washington DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art . One picture each belongs to Rothko's children, Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel. Except No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue) there is another painting in private ownership.
In 1969 Rothko sold the picture to Marlborough AG, Liechtenstein / Marlborough-Gerson Gallery Inc. in New York, which was involved in a fraud scandal with the two Rothko heirs after Rothko's death. After several changes of ownership, the painting was acquired in 1982 by a previously unknown private collector who, after having owned it for around 30 years, put it up for auction at Sotheby's in 2012. The estimated price on that date was between $ 30 million and $ 50 million. The picture is now in an unknown private art collection.
description
Three rectangular color fields are stacked on top of one another on a pale red background of the portrait format. On the blue lower color field, closely followed by a pink field, the largest of the fields is stacked in a rich orange-red color. Individual deep red rivulets flow out from under the blue at irregular intervals, which seem to originate from the application of the still undiluted wet paint in the middle field and which leave traces on the lower edge of the picture. The broad and loose brushstroke can be seen in all color fields, so that there is a variety of finest color gradations. There are no clear boundaries, all colored areas seem to dissolve at their edges, so that the paler background emerges here and there, with the effect that the colored areas seem to float above the picture background. In terms of dimensions, the sum of the side lines of the two lower fields is only slightly larger than the side line of the upper field. The picture is signed and dated # 1 on the reverse , 1954 .
literature
- David Anfam : Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas. Catalog raisonné. New Haven, London 1998. Cat. No. 503.
- Lee Selders: The Legacy of Mark Rothko. Parthas, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86601710-8 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Retail price $ 75,122,500 , accessed April 10, 2015.
- ↑ Masterpiece by Mark Rothko at Sotheby's. Retrieved April 11, 2015.
- ↑ In right Rothko. Retrieved April 11, 2015.
- ^ Judith H. Dobrzynski: A Betrayal. The Art World Can't Forget; The Battle for Rothko's Estate Altered Lives and Reputations. In: The New York Times , November 2, 1998, accessed April 11, 2015.
- ↑ Sotheby's Contemporary Art Auction Evenig, November 13, 2012 , accessed April 18, 2015.