"An illuminating vision executed in a captivating shimmer of chromatic dynamism and peerless painterly finesse, Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Red and Burgundy Over Blue) from 1969 is an indisputably dazzling embodiment of the artist’s legendary abstractions. Emerging from a flickering ground of azure blue, two fields varying in tonality – one a striking crimson and the other a rich burgundy – radiate a steady heat. Built up of innumerable delicate strokes and thin washes, these luminescent forms emphatically attest to the artist’s mastery of light, color, and form. A rare, exquisitely vibrant example from a period characterized by a decidedly somber palette, Untitled (Red and Burgundy Over Blue) exemplifies Rothko’s work in a medium that bore an increasingly profound significance in the twilight years of his career when, tirelessly seeking to broaden the horizons of his artistic practice, he focused his energies upon exploring the absolute limits of painting on paper. Conjuring the radiant sublimity of his most esteemed monumental canvases, Untitled (Red and Burgundy Over Blue) is among the most striking embodiments of Bonnie Clearwater’s description of these works on paper: "…Rothko never abandoned bright colors in his works on paper, the vibrant late works on paper contain a force not experienced in the earlier small works…These late creations, with their dense unmodulated surfaces, do not flicker with light; rather they generate a strong, constant glow." (Exh. Cat., New York, American Federation of the Arts, Mark Rothko: Works on Paper, 1984, pp. 54-55)

"An exquisite summation of the artist’s signature practice, Untitled (Red and Burgundy Over Blue) represents the breathtaking culmination of Rothko’s career-long pursuit of aesthetic transcendence through the conflation of pure color and light. While predominantly known and revered for his corpus of towering abstract canvases, Rothko produced a number of exceptional paintings on paper throughout his career that, in their subtly variegated hues and inherent luminosity, rank among the richest orchestrations of color within his output. In the late 1960s, Rothko experienced a period of intense creativity during which he produced some of his most profound and sublime paintings. Under doctor’s orders not to lift heavy canvases, Rothko turned to the lighter and more versatile medium of paper. Although not able to paint directly onto canvas, Rothko reached an apex in his artistic ambition, producing a series of works on paper as emotionally stunning as his best-known canvases. Paper, with its paradoxical ability to both reflect and absorb light, in many ways reinvigorated the artist’s quest to create nuanced luminosity within a reductive composition. Describing the significance of the medium within Rothko’s oeuvre, Clearwater notes: "These works…are essential to a fuller understanding of Rothko’s career. Together with the canvases, the works on paper chart the artist’s quest for an elemental language that would communicate basic human emotions and move all mankind." (Ibid., p. 17)

"Against the velvety ground of cobalt paint, the rich, painterly forms of Untitled (Red and Burgundy Over Blue) suggest both feverish movement and tranquil repose, emanating an enthralling tension that invites the viewer to lose him or herself completely in the diaphanous fields of unadulterated hue. Dominating the upper register of the composition, the feathered edges of the scarlet form push into the oceanic depth of blue, creating a sense of movement. In stark contrast, the deeper, more meditative passage of maroon subtly structures the painting, grounding the more ethereal scarlet form above with a solid weightiness. The work’s resultant dynamism necessitates the viewer’s constant attention and provides an endlessly engaging experience. Here, Rothko attains chromatic resonance through the meticulous aggregation of translucent veils of brushed pigment, with especially close attention paid to the spaces between forms and edges, as well as the spaces between the forms themselves. Despite the disparity in tone between the red rectangles, the two color fields equilibrate: the incandescent light of one is countered by the weightier density of the other as they hum quietly over the navy ground. Among the most spectacular examples of the artist’s works on paper, Untitled (Red and Burgundy Over Blue) emanates an ethereal luminescence utterly impossible to reproduce in illustration.

"The present work elicits a sensation of deep somatic absorption and introspection, causing the viewer to sink into an even deeper reverie, a pensiveness that Dore Ashton elegantly describes: "The interior realm was where Rothko wished to or perhaps could only live, and what he hoped to express. The ‘theater of the mind,’ As [Stéphane] Mallarmé called it, was immensely dramatic for Rothko. His darkness at the end did allude to the light of the theater in which, when the lights are gradually dimmed, expectation mounts urgently." (Dore Ashton, About Rothko, New York, 1983, p. 189) Through the artist’s prototypical layering of thin washes of paint over one another, often allowing colors from initial layers to flicker through the subsequent coats of pigment, Rothko imbues the present work with an incandescent luminosity. As the rich warm tones hover over the indigo ground, the viewer is transported into a deeply contemplative state archetypal of Rothko’s most accomplished chromatic compositions.

The lot has an estimate of $9,000,000 to $12,000,000.  It sold for $10,515,000.

"The story of Bacon’s first meeting with Dyer has gained a legendary status: Dyer, aged twenty-nine, attempted to break into and burgle Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews. Through the studio’s famous skylight, Dyer tumbled into Bacon’s life, truly falling from above and forever altering the course of the artist’s work. Their relationship was marked by a polarity of extremes: ardent infatuation, enchanted desire, the artist’s intellectualism, Dyer’s rough innocence, passion and love. This full range of emotional and psychological heat seethes beneath the juxtaposition of richly textured paint and spare geometry of the present work. A tenderly executed male nude dominates the composition, his arms and legs crossed in abstractions of pale pink, complemented by rich tones of lustrous black, deep crimson, and lilac. Elegant impressions of corduroy and torn cloth imprint patterns onto the surface of the face, lending texture to this indelible work and acting as an almost tender caress against Dyer’s face and calves. The swipes, smears, and smudges against Dyer’s visage are not marks of brutality, but rather reflect an artist exploring the variation of his color palette. With sumptuous inflections of pigment, both delicately applied and heavily worked up, Bacon’s distortion yet insistence on the physical materiality of Dyer’s body interrogates the limits of the self, presenting an ethereal and unearthly form of his muse that, while undoubtedly grounded in a very real person, is manifestly surreal. John Russell described: “Bacon wrenched, reversed, abbreviated, jellified and generally reinvented the human image. The paint-structure was by turns brusque and sumptuous, lyrical and offhand, pulpy and marmoreal. Swerving, pouncing, colliding with itself, taking for granted the most bizarre conjunctions of impulse, it produced a multiple imagery which was quite new in painting.” (John Russell, Francis Bacon, New York, 1971, p. 168) And yet, the solitary nature of this figure, isolated in an empty geometrically organized space creates a psychological distance the viewer can barely begin to traverse, as if this image of Dyer exists solely as a memory in Bacon’s mind.

"The present work is among the most drastically reworked paintings that Bacon ultimately kept, rather than destroyed. A relentless self-editor, Bacon not only destroyed many of his paintings, but he also reworked and continually altered what had originally been dubbed ‘completed.’ The most striking formal change that was made to the present work was Bacon’s addition of a light blue rectangle slanted toward the lower right corner of the composition, as if refracted light; similarly, a pale blue disc hovers at the right hand edge of the painting, eclipsing a mirrored outline of the black halo behind the head of the spectral male figure. According to Harrison: “The pale blue ‘folded rhomboid’ is another of Bacon’s atavistic self-quotations, for its first manifestation dated back to Man Kneeling in Grass, 1952; here, however, it is employed not so much as an element of Bacon’s presentational dynamics but to create a chasm (in time as well as space) across which Dyer’s image is cast.” (Ibid., p. 246) The pinned-up newspaper against which Dyer’s flesh-colored profile is silhouetted was also not present in the first version of the painting; rather there was a larger organic form less relatable to the main figure. In the present work, Dyer’s reflection obscures this printed material, affixed to the wall with a small pin – a subtle nod to the Cubist tradition of not only incorporating newsprint into collage, but also using the trope of a nail to assert the work’s flatness.

"The velvety black passages, deep maroon chair, and violet and charcoal tones sweeping across Dyer’s figure create a mournful aura, struck through with a luminous pale blue and bright spots of turquoise corduroy – an emotional ode in color to the tempestuous nature of Bacon’s relationship with his muse. Moreover, Harrison argues, the reconfiguration of this canvas could have been in reaction to the tenth anniversary death of Bacon’s lover. Towards the end of the 1960s, the already unsteady and tumultuous relationship between these two men became destructively marred by Dyer’s waning sense of purpose in Bacon’s overwhelming shadow. Indeed, Bacon reached the culmination of his career at the beginning of the 1970s, honored with a one man show at the prestigious Grand Palais in Paris. Bacon had inadvertently fueled Dyer’s paranoia of inadequacy by providing his ‘kept’ existence, and on the eve of the artist’s opening in Paris, Dyer died from an overdose. The degree to which Bacon was consumed by grief, loss, and guilt would find equal measure only in the posthumous paintings of Dyer, whose presence is at once the most pervasive, libidinal, and inventive of Bacon’s entire oeuvre.

"The creative fecundity and emotional and psychological depth searing across the canvas of the present work exemplifies the very best of Bacon’s career. For centuries, portraiture was a means by which to reach an absolute representation of an individual: direct, unambiguous statements of a person’s character and statehood, categorized by identifiers of dress, ownership, and other iconographic markers. At the turn of Modernism, however, artists displayed their doubt in the truthfulness of this structured view of human personality, turning away from a monolithic view of human nature defined by power, and instead to a variable, contingent expression of individuals characterized by flaws and ambiguity. As Dyer’s visage refracts like a prism across the present work, the flickering copy of his face reveals entirely uncharted emotional depths and psychosomatic complexities obscured by an empty expression. Study for Portrait emerges as a touchstone work, the final painting of Bacon's lover George Dyer and a dramatic farewell to what was an all-consuming obsession and what has remained a beautifully tragic romance."

"Surging across the monumental canvas in a riotous tumult of gesture, pigment, and mark, The Eye is the First Circle triumphantly declares Lee Krasner’s supremacy among the celebrated icons of Abstract Expressionism in twentieth century art. At once unruly and lyrical, combative and delicate, utterly expansive and intensely intimate, Krasner’s soaring masterwork hums with the irrepressible energy of wind-whipped storms and apocalyptic events, her gestural ferocity bridled only by the specificity of her virtuosic painterly touch. Painted in 1960, the present work is the crowning embodiment of Krasner’s Umber paintings, the highly lauded series of twenty-four works that, in recent years, have risen to acclaim as the creative pinnacle of her celebrated oeuvre. Created in the years following the sudden and tragic death of her husband, Jackson Pollock, the Umbers are defined by a gestural intensity and ambition of scale unprecedented in Krasner’s earlier output; serving both as testament to and catharsis of the intensive emotional turmoil which fueled her practice at this crucial nexus, these extraordinary paintings remain the most compelling and psychologically evocative compositions of Krasner’s career. An unparalleled masterwork within this already rarified group, the immense surface of The Eye is the First Circle invokes the legacy of her late husband’s action painting as elegiac foil to Krasner’s own, fiercely distinctive brushwork and refined palette of umber and cream hues. Testifying to the significance of the present work, The Eye is the First Circle has been featured in virtually every major survey of Krasner’s work since its execution, including the 1983-1984 exhibition Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and travelling to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the 1999-2001 survey Lee Krasner, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and travelling to the Des Moines Art Center, Akron Art Center, and Brooklyn Museum of Art, amongst numerous others. Most recently, curator David Anfam selected the present work to represent Lee Krasner in his widely acclaimed exhibition Abstract Expressionism, organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2016—2017; of installing the present work alongside several masterpieces by Pollock at the Royal Academy of Arts, Anfam reflects: “I wondered how it would cope with the contenders on the other walls? This huge space included Mural and Pollock's crackling envoi, Blue Poles (1954). The answer was that The Eye is the First Circle held its own and more. At once in dialogue with the Pollocks yet altogether distinct, Krasner’s painting did in a single at what the rest of the Umbers do supremely as an ensemble. Pretty explosive, in fact.” (David Anfam, “Mood Umber,” in Exh. Cat., New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Lee Krasner: The Umber Paintings, 1959—1962, 2018, p. 14) Held in same distinguished private collection for over two decades, The Eye is the First Circle emerges as a singular and defining masterpiece, of not only Krasner’s oeuvre, but of the Abstract Expressionist era.

"In its unavoidable psychic urgency, The Eye is the First Circle speaks to the pivotal juncture at which Krasner found herself at the end of 1950s; still reeling in the wake of Pollock’s fatal car crash in 1956, followed closely by her mother’s passing in 1959 and the cancellation of a planned exhibition at French & Co. that same year, Krasner plunged into a new series of paintings, her emotional turmoil serving as crucial catalyst for the first, monumental Umber paintings. Amongst the earliest works in the series, the present work was painted in Springs, East Hampton, where Krasner had moved her practice into Pollock’s former studio in the barn, the larger space enabling her to experiment on canvases far more massive than any she had used before. These new paintings, in their monumental scale, invoke the largest of Pollock, Kline, and Still’s mural-like masterworks: like those paintings, they cannot be absorbed from a single glance, instead encompassing the viewer within their massive surface. Scholar Barbara Rose describes: “One is ‘in’ them, as one is ‘in’ Claude Monet’s huge pools of Water Lilies, paintings both Krasner and Pollock admired…There is no way in or out of a painting like The Eye is the First Circle, a nearly sixteen-foot long oil on canvas. The painting has become a place rather than an object.” (Exh. Cat. Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, 1983, p. 125) Upon the monumental canvas of the present work, Krasner’s psychic angst is translated in arcs of pigment which writhe, splatter, and dip across the canvas with a sense of untempered motion and force. Describing the emotive intensity of the Umbers in a conversation with the artist, critic Richard Howard noted: “It seems to me that the fact that the pictures were so big suggests a willingness to project movement and even agony in its literal sense, the sense of struggle, on a very considerable scale; that you were aware that the content required such an…”, to which the artist supplied the term: “Arena.” (Exh. Cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Lee Krasner: Umber Paintings, 1959—1962, 1993, n.p.) Krasner’s emotional turmoil at the time was such that, many nights, she found herself unable to sleep. The artist reflects: “I was going deep down into something which wasn’t easy or pleasant. In fact I painted a great many of them because I couldn’t sleep nights. I got tired of fighting insomnia and tried to paint instead.” (The artist cited in Robert Hobbs, Lee Krasner, New York, 1993, p. 151) Without daylight to illuminate her canvas as she worked, Krasner began to eliminate color from her palette, working instead within the nuanced range of amber, cream, and umber tones used in the present work; in the years since their creation, Krasner came to refer to the resulting Umber paintings as the Night Journeys. The title of the present work, The Eye is the First Circle, came to Krasner as, surveying the completed painting, she was struck by the myriad hooded and half-lidded eyes which seemed to peer out from the dense thicket of pigment. The phrase is drawn from the first line of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay ‘Circles,’ which begins: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles,” Essays: First Series, 1841, n.p.) Indeed, within the seemingly frenzied melee of The Eye is the First Circle, essential forms and gestures appear repeatedly to create a coherent and compelling pictorial structure. Despite their raw intensity, each gestural spray of pigment is balanced and counter-balanced by its echo, testifying to the deliberateness and fierce intention with which Krasner built her triumphant masterpiece.

"Executed with virtuosic certainty and vigor, The Eye is the First Circle declares the painterly confidence and technical sophistication of Krasner at the singular peak of her powers. Anfam describes: “With the twenty-four works collectively described as The Umber Paintings (1959-62), Lee Krasner’s art came decisively into its own…in the Umbers, various forces coalesced. They exemplified Krasner’s most outstanding achievement to date, a crucial nexus, and overall high-point of her career.” (David Anfam, “Mood Umber,” in Exh. Cat., New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Lee Krasner: The Umber Paintings, 1959-1962, 2018, p. 9) Amongst the most formative forces behind the Umbers was, without question, Krasner’s confrontation of Pollock’s legacy as figurehead of the action painters and larger New York school. In its explosive physicality, The Eye is the First Circle summons elegiac references to the full-bodied abstraction of such works as Pollock’s One: Number 31 and Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) – paintings created in the same studio in which Krasner now worked. Here, however, the spontaneity and combative force of Pollock’s signature mode is refined within the exacting terms of Krasner’s own, distinctive style; Anfam describes: “this is not Pollock’s ventriloquism as it were… but sovereign Lee Krasner at last speaking loud, clear, and often with anger.” (Exh. Cat., New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Lee Krasner: The Umber Paintings, 1959—1962, 2018, p. 10) Within Krasner’s refined painterly vocabulary, every bold action and delicate touch is tempered by a fluid grace that unifies the dynamism of the overall composition. At once unruly and lyrical, her powerful gesture advances with rhythmic certainty across the canvas, the great arcs of umber pigment interwoven with sprays of cream and earth-toned pigment to create a singular, captivating image. Describing the confident authority with which Krasner absorbed and manifested Pollock’s legacy in her large-scale masterworks, critic Hilton Kramer described: “This is Abstract Expressionist painting of the ‘classic’ type—all energy and struggle and outsize gesture—finally resolved in a pattern of hard-won coherence.” (Hilton Kramer cited in Exh. Cat. Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, 1983, p. 130) Perhaps heralding the interwoven referential and regenerative modes of the Umbers, Emerson’s essay, which begins with the title of the present work, continues: “There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile…New arts destroy the old.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles,” Essays: First Series, 1841, n.p.) Indeed, rather than invoke emotions of grief or loss, the radical exuberance of The Eye is the First Circle insists emphatically upon the vitality and primacy of the living; Anfam describes, “the final impact is electric, tonic, and thus life-affirming.” 

"Motherwell was a young student of twenty-one when the horrors of the Spanish Civil War commenced in 1936, and he would later reflect that it was the most “moving political event” of his youth. (Exh. Cat., New York, Dominique Lévy, Robert Motherwell: Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 2015, p. 6) In 1939, the Spanish Civil War concluded with the fall of Spain’s democratically elected socialist government, which was deposed by a fascist coalition led by dictator Francisco Franco, whose dictatorship would persist until 1975. A three-year struggle of tragic proportions, the Spanish Civil War took the lives of over 700,000 people and witnessed history’s first air-raid bombings of civilians. This callous disregard for civilian life, and the innumerable needless deaths that resulted, inspired Pablo Picasso’s haunting and shattering epic Guernica of 1937. Similarly rendered on a massive scale and in a reduced monochrome palette, the similarities between Picasso’s Guernica and Motherwell’s monumental Elegies, such as the present work, are striking. Nearly a decade following the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1948, Motherwell created his first Elegy with a small drawing to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg titled Elegy to the Spanish Republic published in the avant-garde periodical Possibilities. Over the next four decades, Motherwell would pursue this same structural and thematic motif relentlessly; taken as a whole, the Elegiesconfirm the resounding impact that this war had on the young artist, and indeed stand as a powerful monument to the overwhelming loss during and in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Motherwell stated: “I meant the word 'elegy' in the title. I was twenty-one in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War began…The Spanish Civil War was even more to my generation than Vietnam was to be thirty years later to its generation, and should not be forgotten, even though la guerre est finie.” (David Craven in Joan M. Marter, Abstract Expressionism: The International Context, New Brunswick, 2007 p. 76)

"Addressing the viewer with monumental frontality, the alternating black ovoid and rectilinear shapes of Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 134 reverberate across the surface, the ovals compressed and distorted by imposing rectangular slabs. Rendered in the renounced monochrome palette characteristic of the Elegies, the present work achieves a volatile yet lyrical equilibrium, the heavy blackness of death finding resolution with the airy whiteness of life, and together both culminating in a deeply somber and emotive composition that finds universal resonance far beyond the reaches of the canvas. Diffusing the overwhelming, architectonic weight of these black forms, the gestural brushwork, roughly painted edges, and paint splatters imbue the weighty composition with a sense of movement and expressionistic energy. Form and color conspire together to convey a tension between order and chaos that is a veritable touchstone for abstract art of the period, and places Motherwell in the company of the philosophers, poets, painters and social critics who were his friends and compatriots in activating abstract art and poetic symbolism as expressions of the inexorable cycle of life and death. Speaking to the resounding import of black and white in his Elegy paintings, Motherwell said: “After a period of painting [the Elegies], I discovered Black as one of my subjects—and with black, the contrasting white, a sense of life and death which to me is quite Spanish. They are essentially the Spanish black of death contrasted with the dazzle of a Matisse-like sunlight.” (William S. Lieberman, Exh. Cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, An American Choice: the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, 1981, p. 82) As the recurrent motif of Motherwell’s Elegies, the pictorial symbolism of these ovular slabs has been debated extensively: despite their visual associations with bodies, fruit, phalluses, or even calligraphy, they ultimately evade any specific associations or signifiers in the natural world and instead embody and engender an emotional state, standing as pillars of loss and resilience. In fact, the visual structure of Motherwell’s Elegies speaks more to the influence of Surrealist automatism – especially the work of the Spanish painter Roberto Matta, a close friend of Motherwell’s – and evoke the same potent immediacy, materializing as forms and images the mind already knows on a subconscious level. A masterful articulation of Motherwell’s inimitable artistic philosophy, Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 134 stands as a profoundly illuminating meditation on life and death, desire and lamentation.

"Motherwell’s allusions to human mortality and soulful elevation – indeed the very dialectic of life’s vicissitudes – are most strongly imparted to the viewer through the warm encompassing blacks and bright whites of the Spanish Elegies, particularly the mature works of the 1970s such as Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 134. The unequivocal pinnacle of Motherwell’s canonical oeuvre, the sophisticated and cogent graphic sensibility of his Elegies confirms art’s cathartic role in humanity’s confrontation with the harsh realities of the modern era, specifically the unimaginable injustices caused by war and its aftermath. As elegiacally expressed by the artist himself: “I must emphasize that my Elegies to the Spanish Republicare just that, elegies, in the traditional sense… An elegy is a form of mourning, not a call to action, but symbolization of grief, lyrical in the sense on an outpouring, black in the sense of death, just as white, which contains all colors, represents life.” (Robert Motherwell, A Personal Recollection, 1986) Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 134 revels in the infinite dichotomies of its structure, the stark opposition of black against white and the contrasting ovoid and rectilinear forms. These dualities are ultimately an expression of the dialectic nature of life itself, at once comprising the organic and geometric, vitality and bereavement, life and death."

It has an estimate of $9,000,000 to $12,000,000.  It sold for $10,287,500.

"Gazing down from a towering height, the molten silhouette of Großer Geist Nr. 13 leans ever so slightly forward, its left arm raised in salute as though acknowledging the viewer’s watchful presence. Its surface gleams, reflecting the transient changes of light in its surroundings and reflecting the viewer’s own, undulating image in its mirror-like shine. Without identifying facial features, Großer Geist Nr. 13 is rendered intriguingly anonymous, exuding an air of mysterious ambiguity that invites imagined narratives. Describing the haunting and elusive presence of the Große Geister, German collector Friedrich Christian Flick writes: “The figures and their faces acquire contours, without it being possible to say what they actually are: good or evil spirits, wondering or knowing.” (Ulrich Loock, Thomas Schütte, Berlin, 2004, p. 7)

"The apparent fluidity of the metallic form serves as testament to Schütte’s extraordinary technical virtuosity; within the exacting formal vernacular of his aluminum medium, he forges a seemingly elastic creature who appears both mobile and capable of interaction. Großer Geist Nr. 13’s limbs consist of luscious, smooth rolls that invoke the desire to touch. To create his extraordinary figures, the artist first immerses skeins of twisted wax cords—typically used in aircraft construction—in liquid wax, stabilizing and unifying the sculpture’s essential structure; only then does he cast the resulting spiral forms in the gleaming aluminum of the outer coating. Schütte’s innovative approach to creating the Geister falls in line with his mode of production overall: “Schütte’s usual approach is to...pursue often unusual, unexpected, and unaccustomed strategies.” (Ulrich Loock, Thomas Schütte, Berlin, 2004, p. 9) Within the present work, Schütte luxuriates in the material capacities of aluminum: both its malleability, which allows for the igneous elegance of his figures, and its strength, which allows him to work on a colossal scale.

"Despite its contemporary means of production, Großer Geist Nr. 13 contains a deep awareness of the history of sculpture. Only four years before initiating the Große Geister series, Schütte travelled to Rome to study classical sculpture; the present work’s contrapposto-like stance reveals his particular enchantment with ancient masterpieces. Schütte’s deft fusion of figuration and abstraction links the present work with Modernist efforts to embody motion through abstracted form; Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space likewise presents a humanoid creature lunging forward, exuding a similar sense of dynamic movement. Simultaneously, Großer Geist Nr. 13’s massive scale contains the presence of such Minimalist objects as Robert Morris's large-scale L-Beams, which likewise engage viewers upon a phenomenological plane. In Großer Geist Nr. 13, Schütte revels in the evolution of his artistic medium, translating its history into an ingenious form of its time.

"At once otherworldly and intensely tangible, Großer Geist Nr. 13 defies simple understanding, demonstrating the mystique of the artist’s oeuvre. Indeed, Schütte famously refuses to denote specific meaning to his sculptures—as he states, to “cast them into words or philosophy.” (the artist in Julian Heynen, James Lingwood and Angela Vettese, eds., Thomas Schütte, London 1998, p. 25) Instead, Schütte invites his viewers to ponder Großer Geist Nr. 13 for themselves, encouraging a profound reflection on their place within the surrounding environment, and the inherent limits of human experience."

It has an estimate of $4,000,000 to $6,000,000.  It sold for $4,928,000.

"Painted in 1991, the penultimate year of Joan Mitchell’s prodigious career, L’Arbre de Phyllis exemplifies the painterly bravado, sumptuous coloration, and ambitious mastery of scale which distinguish the artist’s finest masterworks. Named for Mitchell’s close friend and artistic protégé Phyllis Hailey, the present work is a celebration, both of Mitchell’s championship of female painters, and of the rich sensory engagement with nature and memory which forms the heart of her singular practice. Typifying the artistic tendencies of Mitchell’s later paintings, L’Arbre de Phyllis displays an extraordinary synthesis of her earlier work and the more radical, free and open configurations of her later exploration of abstract gesture. Beneath her brush, Mitchell’s canvas ceases to be merely a surface, transforming instead into a performative arena upon which she stages a brilliantly choreographed dance of ever-shifting light, color, movement and texture. Held in the same distinguished private collection for over 25 years, L’Arbre de Phyllis is a commanding testament to the singular creative vision and highly lauded painterly abilities which characterize the artist’s celebrated oeuvre.

"Blooming upon the canvas in a shower of expressive brushstrokes and shocks of vibrant color, L’Arbre de Phyllis is a profound testament to the remarkable vigor and vibrancy of Mitchell’s late paintings. Describing the significance of the present work, scholar Jane Livingston reflects: “L’Arbre de Phyllis…may be seen as a literal summing-up for Mitchell. This work is virtually the last of a long line of pictures whose central image is treelike, more or less centered in the field, a meditative exposition of landscape and the lush, calligraphic possibilities of oil paint on canvas.” (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and travelling), The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, 2002, p. 44) Within the artist’s celebrated late output, L’Arbre de Phyllis is distinguished as a particularly intimate and highly personalized painting: the present work is named for Phyllis Hailey, a student painter and deep admirer of Mitchell who lived with the older artist in Vétheuil for some months in 1974. While Mitchell had declined teaching opportunities at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and other such prestigious institutions in the past, she found satisfaction in mentoring fledgling artists, and particularly in guiding younger female painters. Taking Phyllis under her wing, Mitchell taught her, “how to be more visual and more feeling in her work, insisting she unfailingly know what she was doing when her brush hit the canvas, and endlessly talking color.” (Patricia Albers, Lady Painter, New York 2011, p. 343) Mitchell’s tutelage of Phyllis inspired, in turn, her own work, particularly in moments when Mitchell found herself struggling to tap into the wealth of creativity and painterly vigor so evident in the canvas of L’Arbre de Phyllis; in one note to the younger artist, Mitchell writes: “Well if it means anything to you–you got me painting again… just being in the studio with you makes me want to work… I love you dearly–and it takes a shafted one to recognize another.” (The artist cited in Ibid., p. 344) Tragically, Hailey was killed in a car accident outside Paris in 1978, cutting her life and career short at the young age of 32. Painted over a decade later, L’Arbre de Phyllis serves as poignant tribute to Mitchell’s close friend and protégé, named for a particular ginkgo tree in the artist’s Vétheuil gardens whose foliage Hailey repeatedly rendered in watercolor studies. Beneath Mitchell’s brush, the canvas is transformed into a nuanced dialogue between memory and emotion, gesture and material, representation and abstraction, powerfully evoking the artist’s own comment: “My paintings aren’t about art issues. They’re about a feeling that comes to me from the outside, from landscape…The painting is just a surface to be covered. Paintings aren’t about the person who makes them, either. My paintings have to do with feelings.” (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Joan Mitchell, 1974, p. 6)

"Serving as triumphant conclusion to a long and exceptional artistic evolution, the striking visual dynamism of L’Arbre de Phyllis reveals the artist’s affinity for the American action painters, among whom she lived and worked in the initial decade of her mature career. As one of the few women to garner significant critical acclaim within the predominantly male Eighth Street Club, Mitchell is remembered by art history as the leading female voice of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Across the soaring face of L’Arbre de Phyllis, Mitchell’s unencumbered gestural vocabulary invites the viewer to imagine the physicality of her creative process as, in bursts of physical energy and tactility that defied her ailing heath, she enacts the nuanced dialogue of her abstraction. Scholar Richard D. Marshall comments: “She would open up the tenuous space of her compositions and dance ribbons of color and gesture across the surface, or construct compartmentalized passages of form and color that would coalesce into energized physical expressions. With apparent abandon, she threw, splashed, or forced paint onto the canvas in her distinctive colors and gestures.” (Richard D. Marshall quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, Cheim & Read, The Last Paintings, 2011, n.p.) Profoundly activated by the motion and vitality of Mitchell’s abstraction, L’Arbre de Phyllis achieves a gestural dynamism rivaled only by the sensational, large-scale canvases of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

"While the gestural exuberance of the present work engages in an intense dialogue with the Abstract Expressionists, the exquisite beauty of L’Arbre de Phyllis is rooted in Mitchell’s profound, lifelong appreciation for the beauty of the natural world. A constant presence within her abstract painterly idiom, Mitchell’s affinity for landscape fostered in her a strong connection to the French Impressionists and European Post-Impressionists, whose luminous canvases enacted an equally acute influence upon her work. After relocating to Paris in 1959, Mitchell permanently settled upon a sprawling rural estate in the bucolic Parisian suburb of Vétheuil in 1968. There, secluded from the dominant narrative of Abstract Expressionism, her paintings begin to exhibit the same sumptuousness of palette and exquisite awareness of light, color, and air articulated in the captivating en plein air paintings of Claude Monet, who painted the landscapes of Vétheuil years before. Profoundly inspired by the verdant idyll of the French countryside, Mitchell found the conceptual freedom to create a highly idiosyncratic painterly style which marries the ethereal with the physical, the felt with the seen; Marshall comments: “Throughout her evolution as an abstract painter, Mitchell consistently sought to converge her interests in nature, emotion, and painting. Her subjects were landscape, color, and light and their interaction on a painterly field, and her energetic physical gestures were filled with a romantic sensibility.” (Richard D. Marshall, “Joan Mitchell: The Last Decade, 1982—1992” in Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Joan Mitchell: The Last Decade, 2010, p. 8) Sumptuously layered and smeared upon the soaring canvas, Mitchell’s saturated strokes invoke a lush density reminiscent of Monet’s late renderings of his rose garden at Giverney; rather than striving to emulate a specific landscape, however, L’Arbre de Phyllis powerfully combines allusions to nature and memory within an entirely abstract painterly idiom, echoing Mitchell’s own statement: “I would rather leave Nature to itself. It is quite beautiful enough as it is. I do not want to improve it…I certainly never mirror it. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with. (The artist cited in Marcia Tucker, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1974, p. 8) Anchored, as ever, by Mitchell’s superbly masterful use of white pigment, the broad strokes of marigold yellow tangle with dashes of emerald green, while cobalt blue daubs, drips and smears dance along the bottom of the canvas, immersing the viewer in an captivating sensory experience as rich and intense as if we stood beside Mitchell, surveying the surrounding landscape from her Vétheuil balcony on a sunny day.

The lot has an estimate of $3,000,000 to $5,000,000.   It sold for $5,609,000.

"Interweaving the opposing forces and themes of construction and destruction, possibility and impossibility, abstraction and figuration, Schutz mines both the history of art and her visionary imagination to create a modern-day fresco that collapses time, sound, and space within the two-dimensional picture plane. Commenting on the importance of Civil Planning within Schutz’s oeuvre and the astonishing grandeur of the present work, artist and critic David Salle writes: “[Civil Planning] balances the grandiosity of its conception (dystopian future? Femdom utopia?) with a lot of cleanly depicted local detail, like the garden spade painted at the bottom edge of the canvas. The composition of this very large picture has the complexity and control of classic abstraction – looking at it, I found myself thinking about Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952 – and the alternation of top-to-bottom, full-arm gestural forms with tiny notational marks that pull the eye back into deep illusionistic space feels unforced, something done for sheer pleasure, the sense of wonder that paint can embody.” (David Salle, "Dana Schutz," Artforum 50, December 2011, p. 247)

The lot has an estimate of $300,000 to $400,000.  It sold for a hammer price of $2,000,000.

"Noland began to create images featuring concentric rings of color in 1958 as an exploration in the optical and emotional possibilities of color. These paintings, known as Targets, came to represent a radical break with the reigning artistic tradition. Rejecting the all-over compositions of Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists, Noland took what he saw as the next logical step and asserted the center of the canvas as his focus. The circle, as the ideal form with which to focus on the center, became a signature component of his innovative work; preeminent critic Clement Greenberg praised this dramatic breakthrough: “Noland’s motifs do not possess the quality of images; they are present solely in an abstract capacity, as means solely of organizing and galvanizing the picture field. Thanks to their centeredness and their symmetry, the discs…create a revolving movement that spins out…beyond the four sides of the picture to evoke, once again, limitless space, weightlessness, air.” (Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, Chicago, 1993, p. 98) Aside from the myriad symbolic interpretations of the circle, it is a dynamic shape that perfectly serves Noland’s purpose of examining the visual and expressive effects of color within a rigid geometric format.

"In Blue, Noland's colors seem to pulsate toward the edges of the canvas. The concentrated black dot in the middle of the target acts as a central anchor around which the white, blue, red, and bare canvas rings vibrate; as complementary shades they intensify this effect. Like his former professor Josef Albers, with whom he briefly studied at Black Mountain College, Noland elected to work within a simplified graphic design using a repeating image, allowing him to focus on color, his primary concern. Within this framework, he thoroughly experimented with the palette, scale, size, and saturation of his bands. “Noland's search of the ideal Platonic form has crystallized into an art in which color and form are held in perfect equilibrium. The spare geometry of his form heightens the emotional impact of his color. The rational and the felt, distilled form and sensuous color intermesh to create a magic presence. His space is color. His color is space. Color is all.” (Diane Waldman in Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective, 1977, p. 36) As a result, the emotional impact of his color is consistently heightened. For this reason, since their inception, Noland’s Targets have been regarded as quintessential examples of Post-Painterly Abstraction.

"As an emblematic model of this style, Blue vividly underlines Noland’s unique command over technique and space. He painted his first Targets with soft, blurred edges, but they eventually became more sharply delineated, aligning with the then-emerging style known as Hard Edge painting. Blue represents a transitional point in this process; while the central rings are tightly defined, the largest ring and adjoining sapphire ground still bear the traces of the artist’s soaking technique. In some areas the paint is notably more concentrated, while in others it is thinner and the weave of the canvas is highly visible – a result of Noland’s soak-stain technique, first employed and made famous by his peer Helen Frankenthaler. These elegant fluctuations soften the transition from outer band to surrounding space, cushioning the intensity of the brilliant hues and eliminating the problematic wedges of inert canvas from his earlier works. Though Noland increasingly suppresses expressionist features within his praxis, he maintains a need to allow the process of pouring and staining an active and highly emotive process in his practice, lending works like Blue an organic and painterly quality."

It has an estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000.  It sold for $5,950,000.

"Set in a resplendent monochrome, Transition Team places the viewer into an alluring fantasy of the artist’s creation. Tansey presents his superbly precise figures—an intriguing cast of characters that includes Madonna, John F. Kennedy Jr., Princess Diana, Drew Barrymore, and Kurt Cobain—in a transitional moment in time: the liminal space between the very-late night and the very-early morning, in which half the figures stumble home from a drunken evening, and the other half begin to clean up the night’s mess. On the right side of the canvas, the distinct profile of Princess Diana canters stoically across the horizontal axis on horseback, luxuriant furs draped across her arm; to the left, Madonna darts surreptitiously from the scene, her gaze fixed on a destination beyond our view. Scattered within the dense thicket of distorted striations lining the background, a motley crew of figures such as Drew Barrymore, Courtney Love, and assorted others peer out in apparent interest, their profiles repeated in warped ripples across the composition. Standing with his trench-coat clad back to the viewer, a paparazzo diligently documents the scene unfolding before us; clearly indicated by the tell-tale camera flash from the reflective darkness, his suggested photograph deftly duplicates the artist’s own representational efforts. By depicting a wide assortment of cultural icons, Tansey invokes the experience of dreaming—diving into a familiar yet elusive motion picture whose meaning one can never fully grasp. While the “ineffable familiarity of the figures promotes confidence in the images’ veracity,” the background—an eerie, pitch-black sky—echoes the nondescript and unchartered territory of dreams. (Judi Freeman, Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mark Tansey, 1993, p. 19) A gust of wind blows over the eclectic crowd, sweeping the white blonde hair of the central figure over her shoulders, and creating a palpable sense of motion. Save for the littered bottles strewn on the ground, “Everything and everyone in the painting seem to be moving...As the eye traces this line of movement, the painting is actually transformed into a motion picture.” (Mark C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & The Ends of Representation, Chicago, 1999, p. 130) Surreal and arcane, Transition Team’s spectral landscape invites even closer investigation, causing viewers to get lost in its ghostly terrain.

"Illustrative of Tansey’s “quest for meaning, for comprehension, [and] for truth,” Transition Team questions the very nature of realism itself, seeking to expose the obvious artifice of long-held painterly assumptions. (Judi Freeman, Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mark Tansey, 1993, p. 16) Mimicking this philosophical exercise, Transition Team’s figures appear wary of their uncertain location; they peer around their surroundings and survey the scene. Elaborating upon his philosophy of art, Tansey explained: “A painted picture is a vehicle. You can sit in your driveway and take it apart or you can get in it and go somewhere.” (The artist cited in Ibid., p. 26) Tansey creates various avenues of meaning for his viewers to explore. Upon careful examination, viewers latch onto Transition Team’s peculiarities: the way in which it willfully defies the laws of reflection, playfully multiplies figures, and unabashedly compresses and stretches them to the point of unrecognizability. Viewers can detect Tansey’s duplication and compression of the central figures in the puddle beneath them; at least two smaller images of the riding Princess Diana are discernable, and the bottom left corner reveals a glimpse of a compressed Madonna fleeing the scene. They can trace the compression of the central, diligent workman directly beneath his “normal-sized” form. In the background, “[the] figures are squeezed...until they are flattened into a series of parallel lines.” (Mark C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & The Ends of Representation, Chicago, 1999, pp. 130-31) By toying with illusionism, “The longer one ponders this painting, Tansey has accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of inscribing an infinite number of perspectives within a finite space. In contrast to Cubism...Tansey is not interested in synchronizing viewpoints in a way that makes it possible to rise above them...he seeks to lure us ever more deeply into the flux of time and the gaps of space by drawing the viewer into the work of art and drawing the work of art into the field of the viewer.” (Mark C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & The Ends of Representation, Chicago, 1999, p. 132) With Transition Team’s breakdown of the picture plane into strata of various perspectives, Tansey exposes painting's inherent fallacy, by denying viewers the ability to enter a "window" unto another world.

"Transition Team encapsulates the postmodern inquiry into the conventions and practices of seeing and representation. Developing his signature style during the 1970s—the dawn of the Information Age and the period of mass media’s rapid expansion—Tansey synthesized the emerging aesthetic impulse of appropriation and remix characteristic of the contemporaneous Pictures Generation with a rich analysis of the history of representational painting. Reflecting on this formative period, Tansey recalls: “My paintings began really as a result of...the death of painting in the mid-1970s. It was a time when the formalists’ prohibition against representation seemed no longer to have authority.” (The artist cited in Ibid., p. 3) Freeing himself entirely from Abstract Expressionist dogma, which dominated American art for decades, Tansey returned to figuration with full force; not only does he invoke the visual vocabulary of the long-cherished genre of history painting, but also he draws from mass media source material to create a uniquely contemporary image. With its broody atmosphere of otherworldly exploration, Transition Team reflects Tansey’s endless fascination with “humankind’s confrontation with the unknown, the mysterious, or the awe inspiring,” and provides a veritable “metaphor for the eternal quest for knowledge.” (Judi Freeman, Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mark Tansey, 1993, p. 27)"

"Emerging from the saturated, raspberry-hued ground of Scratch Pink, an intricate network of magenta ridges and furrows coalesce to form a mesmerizing cartographic structure; while conjuring images of spider webs, neighborhood streets, and arterial veins, Bradford’s uncertain grid remains resolutely abstract, absorbing the viewer in a mesmerizing vision of prismatic hue. The rich multidimensional nature of the present work is due to Bradford’s signature usage of salvaged paper, painstakingly harvested from the artist’s own urban environs, which he selectively layers, scores, and bleaches upon the canvas in a quasi-archaeological fashion. This material transformation is central to Bradford’s work; through his meticulous excavation of the vestiges of everyday life, he is able to trace the human presence by its own discarded signifiers. Explaining his process in cross-disciplinary terms, Bradford describes the dichotomies in his work: “It’s almost like a rhythm. I’m a builder and a demolisher. I put up so I can tear down. I’m a speculator and a developer. In archaeological terms, I excavate and I build at the same time.” (The artist, cited in “Mark Bradford: Politics, Process and Postmodernism,” Art21, April 1, 2013) Through his intensely physical approach to the material presence of painting, Bradford pursues new frontiers of abstraction, creating a corpus of captivating paintings that merge complex layers of personal and socio-significance to create a mesmeric vision for the inherent decay and subsequent regenerative vibrancy of metropolitan life. Coursing with a stunning vitality that evinces the rigorous physical creation of its variegated surface, Scratch Pink serves as stunning testament to the groundbreaking nature of Bradford’s practice, encapsulating the artist’s virtuosic ability to harvest, incorporate, and transform the linguistic and visual ephemera of his surroundings to reveal new visions of contemporary humanity."

It has an estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000.  It sold for $3,020,000.

Lot 3, "Arcaderm" by Julie Mehretu, ink and acrylic on canvas, 84 1/4 by 120 1/4 inches, 2005

Lot 3, "Arcade," by Julie Mehretu (b. 1970), is an ink and acrylic on canvas that measures 84 1/4 by 120 1/4 inches.  It was created in 2005.

The catalogue provides the following commentary:

"I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics, and that’s why I am interested in it as a metaphor for those institutions. I don’t think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space. It’s about space, but about spaces of power, about the ideas of power” (The artist cited in ‘Tracing the Universe of Julie Mehretu, A Choral Text’ in exh. cat. Castille, Julie Mehretu, 2006-2007, p. 29).

"Achieving an immediate and emphatic graphic impact, Julie Mehretu’s Arcade from 2005 confronts the viewer with a dizzying abstract matrix that conjures infinity in its depth, intricacy, and multi-dimensionality. A superb example of Mehretu’s signature mode and executed upon a dramatic scale, the present work achieves a layering and compression of form, line, and hue that defies preconceived limitations of two-dimensional painting. Seeming to collapse centuries of art historical references within a single canvas, Arcade employs new narratives of abstraction as a means of exploring the complex political and social realities of the twenty-first century. Honored as a recipient of the MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ Fellowship Award in 2005 and, more recently, of the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts in 2015, Mehretu has garnered widespread acclaim as amongst the most influential artists of her generation; featured in innumerable prestigious exhibitions and biennales worldwide, her distinctive output has become instantly recognizable for its complex compositions and mythical worlds that, unfolding before the viewer, toe the line between the real, virtual, and imagined. Testifying to the caliber of the present work, Arcade was included in Mehretu’s critically acclaimed exhibition in 2006-2007, Black City, on view at several institutions including the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark and the Kunstverein Hannover, Germany. Simultaneously riotously chaotic and exactingly precise, Mehretu’s cacophony of mark-making draws the viewer into a world seen simultaneously from above, outside, and within; from the depths of this architectonic matrix, a burst of metallic golden rays expands outward to the farmost edges of Mehretu’s canvas, illuminating the collapsing vortex of half-formed façades and cross-sectioned grids in the mesmerizing space before us. 

"Architecturally structured and delicately layered, Arcade epitomizes the complex engagement with art history for which Mehretu is best known; invoking movements as disparate as Constructivism and Futurism, the present work appears “built…over time, stratum upon stratum, beginning with architectural scores sampled from sources at once diverse and precise, and materializing through an accretion of graphic shapes and expressive marks.” (Exh. Cat., Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, Deconstruction/Construction, 2007, p. 50) Indeed, the present work derives its title from the Arcades Project, an unfinished undertaking of the German literary critic Walter Benjamin, written between 1927 and 1940; in this posthumously published text, Benjamin addresses the Parisian passages couverts de Paris, or 'arcades,' and their direct link to the city's distinctive city life and Flâneur culture. Furthermore, Benjamin conceived of the Arcades Project as a manifestation of collage technique in literature, an aesthetic that is beautifully embodied in the riotous linear dynamism of the present work. Mehretu here demonstrates an acute awareness of Benjamin's text and Giacomo Balla’s Futurist explorations of motion, light and atmosphere, while her seemingly suspended forms suggest Kandinsky’s prismatic, celestial compositions; however, the freneticism of such antecedents is channeled through Mehretu’s own more measured approach, the velocity and potency bridled by the rigorous exactitude of her unique practice. With painstaking care, the artist culls the diverse forms and figures within her compositions from a vast array of archival architectural materials; ranging from ancient city grids to forgotten plans for public monuments, maps of urban sprawl to intricate palatial edifices, Mehretu’s source materials invoke the premise of architecture as a medium for examining collective histories. Within Arcade, Mehretu’s imagined topography is realized through a formal vocabulary of color, gesture, line, mark, and form, utilizing the visual foundations of our civilization as materials to be flattened, juxtaposed, and stratified upon one another. “Each painting is an occurrence preserved, but only for a moment, in an uneasy split-second resting point. Composition is action, a physical laying down of one snapshot over another. Stacked in transparent films, coexistent histories are embedded yet still visible in the terrain of a hyperreal city.” (Ibid.) Achieving a visual panoply of imagery that evokes the events of our times while intimately engaging art historical precedent, Arcade mines the past for formal techniques and tools with which to examine our world; within this matrix of visual incident, Mehretu’s painting offers a new language of abstraction as a way of articulating the chaos, complexity, and universality of the human experience."

The lot has an estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000.  It sold for $3,020,000.