No 1 (Royal Red and Blue) - Mark Rothko

Price in US $ - 75.1 million

Mark Rothko’s magisterial abstraction, “No.1 (Royal Red and Blue)” (1954) is one of the most widely exhibited and written-about painting from the collection of Anne and John Marion.  Its impressive history included the artist’s first museum exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it showed alongside eight other Rothkos in 1954, in what was then a contemporary artist showcase. Most of the other examples are now housed in museums, including the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was described by Sotheby's as "a seminal, large-scale masterpiece".

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Orange, Red, Yellow - Mark Rothko

Price in US $ - 86 million

Orange, Red, Yellow, a 1961 Color Field painting by Mark Rothko, has become the most expensive post-war work sold at auction. The painting's trio of orange and yellow rectangles bobbing atop a cherry-red background forms a palette that's as eye-catching as a sunset or a Popsicle. Rothko's shimmering "colour field" paintings have never been as attention grabbing as his macho Action Painting contemporaries Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

These subtly spiritual works, when properly lit, are thought to offer a similar lofty experience that one gets in a place of worship, like a cathedral. Only their refusal to associate with language, or any period in art history, mean they transcend the specificity of religion.

White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) - Mark Rothko

Price in US $ - 72.8 million



















White Center is part of Rothko's signature multiform style: several blocks of layered, complementary colors on a large canvas

Mark Rothko is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label. One of the most crucial philosophical influence on Rothko was Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.