Record-breaking auction of Macklowe art collection turns the transcendent into a transaction

Open this photo in gallery:

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.”

From the descriptions in the sale catalogue, you might have thought these paintings by modern American masters represent a transcendence of the material world, but the dispiriting spectacle of the Macklowe collection sale reveals the truth: The art only equals money.

Of course, Sotheby’s wasn’t dispirited. Monday evening, it hammered down 35 pieces from the collection of New York developer Harry Macklowe and his ex-wife Linda for US$676-million. That was Sotheby’s best-ever sale for a single-owner collection – and proved to those who care that the market remains robust with persistent demand for art created by the old white men of the 20th century. Strategically assembled by the discerning Linda Macklowe over five decades, the collection features works by the biggest names in postwar American and European art, including Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso – many of them executed at pivotal moments in the artists’ careers.

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 more the copywriters huff and puff, the more you know that these circular arguments for the art’s greatness are only intended to drive up the prices. The high-end auction market often tries to equate ineffable cultural achievement and million-dollar hammer prices, but the case of the Macklowe collection reveals that paradox at its most obscene.

The unhappy Macklowes, both in their 80s and separated after 59 years of marriage, were forced to sell their collection as part of their divorce settlement. That 2018 judgment by Justice Laura Drager of the Supreme Court of New York County reveals a lot about what art represented to the couple.

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.

In their divorce suit, Harry petitioned to sell the collection but Linda proposed that she keep it, selling off pieces as needed to support her lifestyle, while he keep the real estate. The two sides could not agree, however, on how much the art is worth. His estimate was far higher because her lawyers were deducting the cost of selling the art from its value. After all, Sotheby’s doesn’t work for free.

The judge rejected that method of accounting and ruled the only way to put a value on the art was to ask the market and then divide the proceeds. This week, the market responded loudly, and that was only half the art. A second group of 35 works will be sold next May and may then break Christie’s US$835-million record for selling David Rockefeller’s collection in 2018. At the midway point, the Macklowe total is already approaching Harry’s higher estimate for the entire collection.

In rejecting Linda’s bid to keep the art, the judge concluded that while the couple enjoyed the aesthetics of art collecting, “the collection also served as a device to preserve and increase their personal wealth.” She noted that it was by far their largest investment; that they sold as well as bought and, most revealingly, that while doing their estate planning they had made no provisions to either donate the art or establish a private foundation that might care for it after their deaths. That is what one would have expected them to do if they felt the collection was an achievement that had to be kept intact, or that individual pieces were so important that they belonged to the world – especially since Linda has served as a trustee on the boards of both the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim.

Depending on their tax status, a donation might have also made financial sense. For wealthy individuals who have seen the values of long-held collections balloon, the tax credits for a donation assessed at those high prices may be as useful as the proceeds of a sale that would be subject to taxes on capital gains.

Collectors sometimes say they don’t own their art, they just hold it for future generations – and one obvious place to do that holding is inside a public art gallery. God knows, museums are imperfect institutions – as their current struggles to decolonize their collections reveal – but they still maintain the ability to remove art from the marketplace and raise it up to towards those transcendent aspirations. In the sad case of the Macklowe collection, the art proved about as sublime as a wheelbarrow full of poker chips.

Sign up for The Globe’s arts and lifestyle newsletters for more news, columns and advice in your inbox.