By Cathleen McGuigan
Newsweek Web Exclusive
March 26, 2010
When Mark Rothko committed suicide in 1970, he left behind hundreds of unsold paintings. Partly, he didn’t want to flood the market, but he also found it hard to part with them. Rothko considered his artworks to be his children, and he didn’t like to send them off to live with just anybody. So he auditioned his patrons. In the early ’60s, when Jean Kennedy Smith, a sister of President Kennedy, asked to take one or two paintings home “on approval,” he refused: “It is not a matter of my pictures fitting in with something else,” he huffed. When a woman wanted to exchange a dark canvas she’d bought—it depressed her, she said—for one with bright colors, he gave back her money. One collector who did pass muster was David Rockefeller. In 1960, he bought, for less than $10,000, White Center, a painting of shimmery white and yellow bands on a luscious pink field. It hung in his office until 2007, when he sold it at Sotheby’s for $72.8 million—still the auction record for a contemporary American painting. We can only imagine how Rothko would feel about holding the high-water mark in today’s bloated art market, but it would probably drive him right up the wall.
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