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Unlike “Bracket,” which appeared in a 2022 exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, Rockefeller’s Joan Mitchell works haven’t been seen in public since the 1950s.
Sandrine Marty/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
Rockefeller University in New York City plans to sell two paintings by the abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell to help fund biomedical research, The New York Times reported.
The paintings, “Untitled” and “City Landscape,” are expected to fetch as much as $32 million when Christie’s puts them on the auction block later this month.
Rockefeller University president Richard Lifton told the Times that the institution, which was founded by the eponymous industrialist in 1901 as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, is keen to support more work in artificial intelligence and neurodegeneration, among other things.
“Science is very expensive,” Lifton said, and becoming more so due to the rising costs of advanced technology. “I’m no connoisseur of art, but it did not escape our attention that Joan Mitchell’s paintings have dramatically increased in value in recent years.”
The paintings, acquired by the institution in the 1950s, have not been seen outside the campus since. For years, one hung in the president’s house and the other in the dining room of a lab building.
“We’re not a museum,” Lifton told the Times. “We recognize it might not be great to be hanging onto works that are this valuable.”
Rockefeller University has an endowment valued at $2.5 billion, according to its most recent tax filings, and recently ended a five-year fundraising campaign that netted $777 million, The New York Times reported.
