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New York’s Whitney Museum is selling a Willem de Kooning painting at Christie’s next week, just three years after it formally received the work as a gift from the family of one of its former presidents.
Yellow River (1958), a large abstract picture dominated by hefty sweeps of blue and yellow, has an estimate of $12 million to $18 million and will appear in Christie’s 20th century evening sale on November 17. The painting is being sold to benefit the museum’s collection, according to Artnet News, which first reported the story and the auction house’s catalog.
Yellow River belonged to David M. Solinger, a lawyer and collector who became the Whitney’s first president from outside the Whitney family in 1966. Solinger bought the painting from Sidney Janis Gallery in 1959, and according to Christie’s, he liked it so much that it hung for a time at the foot of his bed, where he could see it every morning.
Following Solinger’s death in 1996, the painting passed to his wife, Betty Ann Besch Solinger, who promised it to the Whitney in 2011. The work was exhibited at the museum that year, but the gift was not formally completed until 2023, after she passed in 2022. Now, three years later, it is headed back to the market.
This isn’t the first time the Whitney has dabbled with deaccessioning, the practice of selling works from a museum’s permanent collection. In 2023, the museum sent a group of paintings by Edward Hopper, Maurice Prendergast, John Marin, and others to Sotheby’s. It was led by Edward Hopper’s Cobb’s Barns, South Truro (1930–33), which came with an $8 million to $12 million estimate.
At the time, Jane Panetta, then the Whitney’s curator and director of the collection, told ARTnews that the sales were part of a broader effort to expand and diversify the museum’s holdings.
“We’re always thinking about how one defines ‘the museum of American art,’ being mindful of wanting the collection to accurately represent the United States,” Panetta said. “We think that means the collection has to evolve. We have to try and close critical gaps, and having endowment funds for acquisitions is a key means to doing that.”
In fact, the Whitney’s 2023 Collection Strategic Plan recommended making deaccessioning a more regular part of the institution’s collecting strategy, particularly in areas where it already holds a substantial amount of work. The museum still has several major paintings by de Kooning, including Door to the River (1960), which dates from roughly the same period as Yellow River.
Painted in 1958, Yellow River belongs to a particularly important moment in de Kooning’s career, when he was moving away from the figures of his celebrated “Woman” paintings toward increasingly abstract compositions inspired in part by the landscape and highways around New York. The painting was included in his 1959 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, where, according to Christie’s, 19 of the 22 works had sold by noon on opening day.
Deaccessioning remains a touchy subject in the museum world, though the Association of Art Museum Directors says it’s acceptable for institutions to use proceeds from sales to acquire new works or pay for the direct care of their collections. According to the Whitney’s collections policy, works are intended to remain in the collection permanently, while sales that would improve or refine its holdings are generally okay.