Sotheby’s auction house just sold an abstract painting by Mark Rothko that provides “a portal to the sublime.” And it sold a work of “profound beauty and elegiac grace” by Brice Marden, as well as a massive flower painting by Cy Twombly that evokes a “duality between fecundity and decay.”
Layering on the superlatives with a palette knife, the Sotheby’s catalogue states that lot 20 “is the quintessential embodiment of the commanding abstraction and richly profound connotations which define and distinguish Franz Kline’s inimitable painterly oeuvre.” And lot 22, a 1993 abstraction by the German artist Gerhard Richter, is “an extraordinary exemplar of … a series of paintings widely recognized as the pre-eminent venture in abstract art of the last fifty years.
The divorce was a bitter one: The New York press has delighted in the story of how Linda Macklowe discovered that her husband had been keeping another woman in a nearby building for two years and how, when he remarried, Harry Macklowe plastered 13-metre-high photographs of himself and his new bride on a Park Avenue building he owned – within sight of his ex-wife’s apartment.