New York, Robert Mnuchin's collection at auction: there's also a 70 million Rothko

A selection of works from the collection of renowned New York gallerist and collector Robert E. Mnuchin (1933 - 2025) will be auctioned in May in New York at Sotheby’s, with a total estimate exceeding $130 million (about 111 million euros). The collection, built up over decades together with his wife Adriana, represents one of the most significant nuclei of post-World War II art assembled by a private collector, evidence of a lifelong cultivated passion guided by a simple principle: buy only works you truly love.

An atypical figure on the international art scene, Mnuchin was one of the few players able to move with ease between the worlds of finance and the art market. Before becoming one of New York’s most respected gallery owners, he had in fact built a long career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, where he joined in 1957 and where, over the course of three decades, he rose to senior roles and even joined the institution’s management committee.

Born in New York, Mnuchin graduated from Yale University in 1955 and, after serving in the U.S. Army, began his career in finance. Within Goldman Sachs he was among the key players in the development of the block trading business along with Gus Levy, a central figure in the bank’s history. Among colleagues he was known by the nickname “Coach,” a sign of his authority and leadership role within the organization. Parallel to their financial careers, Mnuchin and his wife Adriana soon began to cultivate a growing passion for art. At first, their path as collectors was driven by curiosity and a desire to learn more about the art world: they visited museums, galleries, and exhibitions, trying to figure out which works really struck them. In the course of these explorations they discovered a particular interest in abstraction, a language that would later make a decisive mark on their collection.

Among the artists who gradually entered their horizon were central figures of Abstract Expressionism such as Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. Mnuchin developed a particularly close relationship with the latter artist, whom he considered one of the absolute protagonists of twentieth-century art and whom he once called “the chairman of the board” of contemporary art.

The Mnuchins’ collecting was based on a very specific principle: to buy only works that they both loved and wanted to live with. According to the testimony of their daughter Valerie Mnuchin, the couple considered collecting to be an almost obsessive form of passion, geared toward ambitious and complex works that could continually engage the viewer’s gaze. They sought what they called “class A paintings,” works that represented the highest moment in an artist’s output.

One of the masterpieces set to lead the May auction is Mark Rothko’s 1957 Brown and Blacks in Reds, estimated at between $70 million and $100 million (about €60-86 million). The painting, nearly six feet tall, belongs to the most important decade of the artist’s career, when Rothko developed his famous language based on large rectangular fields of overlapping color. The work is one of fifteen monumental paintings made in 1957 that are over two meters in size, many of which are now housed in major international museums.

Before entering the Mnuchin collection, the painting had been purchased around 1957 by the Joseph E. Seagram & Sons company, and its intense color palette has often been related to the later commission of the famous Seagram Murals made by the artist in the late 1950s. Over the years, the work has been shown in some of the most important exhibitions devoted to Rothko, from the major traveling retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum between 1978 and 1979 to the Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition.

Other notable lots include No. 1 from 1949, also by Rothko, estimated at between $15 million and $20 million. The work belongs to a crucial transitional moment in the artist’s research, when he was moving from the more nebulous forms of the so-called multiforms of the 1940s to the celebrated color fields that would define his mature production in the 1950s. Both formal solutions coexist in this painting, making it a rare testimony to that stylistic transition.

The nucleus dedicated to Willem de Kooning represents a kind of concentrated retrospective of the artist’s career, with works spanning four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Prominent among them is Untitled XLII from 1983, a significant example of the painter’s late phase, characterized by a more fluid and lyrical painting, enlivened by chromatic passages of blue, red, pink and purple. The painting will make its market debut on this very occasion.

Another highlight of the sale is Harleman, made in 1960 by Franz Kline. The painting, held in the Mnuchin collection for more than two decades, is considered one of the best examples of the artist’s celebrated black-and-white compositions, among the most iconic images of Abstract Expressionism. The work’s title refers to the artist’s friend Stanley Harleman and suggests an underground connection between his radical abstractions and the figures and places of his Pennsylvania hometown.

The selection also includes works by artists who have made a profound mark on contemporary art beyond Abstract Expressionism. Among them appears Jeff Koons’s 1986 Louis XIV, part of the celebrated Statuary series. In these works Koons first adopted mirror-polished stainless steel, a material that would later become one of the most recognizable signatures of his production. The work is inspired by a fiberglass bust the artist found on Canal Street and marks his first direct confrontation with art history. Mnuchin was among Koons’s earliest supporters and was instrumental in establishing him by organizing one of the first major retrospectives devoted to the artist in New York. The example presented in the auction is an artist’s proof of an edition of three plus one, while the other examples are held in important museum collections, including the Nasher Sculpture Center, The Broad and the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Prior to the auction, a selection of the works are on public view in a special exhibition at the Mnuchin Gallery from March 11 to 15. Thereafter, the major works will travel in a series of international exhibitions that will touch Hong Kong, Los Angeles and London before returning to New York for the pre-auction exhibition at the Breuer.

Taken together, the works tell the story not only of the refined taste of a great collector, but also of a precise vision of art of the second half of the twentieth century. As Lisa Dennison, chairman of Sotheby’s Americas, noted, the collection reflects Robert and Adriana Mnuchin’s ability to pinpoint decisive moments in artists’ careers by choosing ambitious and powerful works. A philosophy summed up by Mnuchin himself in simple words, “the real reason you buy art is because you love it, love it, and love it.”

New York, Robert Mnuchin's collection at auction: there's also a 70 million Rothko

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