Rich People Have Run Out of Things to Buy: $8 Million for Pencil Lines
In today's installment of rich people have run out of things to buy:
A six-by-six-foot canvas. Off-white. Pencil lines.
Sotheby's estimate: $6 million to $8 million.
It's Agnes Martin's Desert (1967), and it goes under the hammer in New York on November 16.
Yes, it looks like a legal pad.
No, you couldn't do it. Every line is drawn by hand, and the wobble is the point. Sotheby's calls it "the stutter of Martin's pencil."
The backstory: 1967 is the year Martin, just as she was getting famous, walked out of New York, quit painting and ended up alone on a remote mesa in New Mexico. She didn't paint again until 1974.
The paper trail: bought in 1970 by the collectors Emily and Burton Tremaine. Toured Australia and New Zealand in a Museum of Modern Art show. Owned since 1987 by Lenore and Bernard Greenberg. She ran MOCA's board. He co-founded LA Opera.
Now the part the "my kid could do that" crowd always misses.
In 2023, Martin's Grey Stone II carried the exact same $6 to $8 million estimate.
Eight bidders later, it sold for $18.7 million. Still her record.
The seller's collection was started with the insurance payout from a jewel heist. "The theft was one of the best things that ever happened to me," she said.
The rich haven't run out of things to buy.
They've run out of Agnes Martins.
