Police Gazette - Willem de Kooning

Price in US $ - 63.5 million



Willem de Kooning’s Police Gazette, an abstract 1955 landscape, is one of his more abstract canvases, primarily yellow, red and green. It was painted while he was living in New York City before moving to East Hampton, N.Y. By early 1930s Kooning had started experimenting with abstract expressions, using living shapes and simple geometric compositions that suggested the artist’s absolute contrast sense of creating formal elements that prevails in his work throughout his career. de Kooning is considered second only to Pollock in the Abstract Expressionist canon.

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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.

Woman III - Willem de Kooning

Price in US $137,500,000




Willem de Kooning was a Dutch abstract expressionist artist. The hallmark of de Kooning's style was an emphasis on complex figure ground ambiguity. Background figures would overlap other figures causing them to appear in the foreground, which in turn might be overlapped by dripping lines of paint thus positioning the area into the background.

"The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves."