On Monday, Sotheby’s announced that a block of modern and contemporary art from the personal collection of Pierre and Sao Schlumberger is expected to sell for upwards of $85 million when it goes to auction this November.
Highlights of the sale include No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black, and Orange), by Mark Rothko, which Sotheby’s predicts could sell for over $50 million, and Picasso’s 1956 painting of his children Claude and Paloma, which is expected to sell for around $7 million. Also included in the auction are works by Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, and Jean Dubuffet. The collection will be on view in Hong Kong and London before heading to New York in November.
Oliver Barker, deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, called the collection, “a unique aesthetic that blended their European roots with their American experience.” Pierre Schlumberger was a French oil industry tycoon whose family founded Schlumberger Limited, the largest oil field services company in the world, in 1926. He died in 1986.