Modern masterworks from a Paul Rudolph jewel are hitting the auction block next week

If you’ve commissioned a work of art for a home, it’s only fitting that you’ll deck it out with paintings to suit. That was the case with Anne and Sid Bass, the billionaires and philanthropists, who tapped American architect Paul Rudolph to design their sprawling Fort Worth, Texas home in the early 1970s. Both homeowners were just 28 years old at the time and, as the story goes, spent an entire year drafting their commission letter to Rudolph.

The Bass house was Rudolph’s largest residential project – an impressive stack of gleaming white steel slabs that jutted out in four different directions. The architect, by then one of the country’s most sought-after builders, ensured the home would be the ideal vessel for hanging works of art, with skylights and broad walls. On those walls hung one of the most impressive private collections of postwar art, with monumental works by Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, Alexander Calder and more.

Nine of these masterpieces will be anchoring Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale 12 May, marking the first time these works have been on the market in decades.

‘Sid and Anne Bass stand among the world’s most formidable and influential art collectors, combining exquisite taste with the highest level of connoisseurship,’ said Bonnie Brennan, Christie’s CEO, in a statement. ‘The fantastic home they built together in Fort Worth, Texas in the early 1970s was a singular representation of their combined vision – built to perfectly showcase their inimitable collection.’

The paintings worked in perfect concert with Rudolph’s architecture. In the living room – with its double height window framing a view to a landscape designed by Robert Zion and Russell Page – Morris Louis’s Gamma Upsilon (1960) and Frank Stella’s Firuzabad III (1970) provide vibrant pulses of color in the stark beige-and-white room. Two Agnes Martin works (Untitled #11 and Untitled #2) flanked a grand piano with Stella’s notched Itata nearby. A playroom, meanwhile, hosted Ellsworth Kelly’s 15-foot-wide Blue Black Red, while Gino Severini’s Danseuse had pride of place near Anne’s desk.

The most pulse-quickening item to hit the block is Rothko’s No. 4 (Two Dominants) [Orange, Plum, Black], a work Alex Rotter, Christie’s chairman of 20th and 21st century art, terms ‘the artist at his finest.’

‘Memorialized in MoMA’s “15 Americans” exhibition in 1952, the work is a masterpiece that speaks to the artist’s brilliance,’ he added. The painting is estimated to achieve around $35 million (£26.3 million).

Art from the Bass House will be followed by Anne H. Bass: The New York Interiors in June, an auction of artwork and furnishings from Anne’s Manhattan apartment, designed in collaboration with the decorator Mark Hampton. Both Bass sales fall two years after another Bass auction, the Collection of Anne H. Bass, also drawn from her apartment, following Anne’s death in 2020. That selection, which included two Rothkos in the dozen lots, yielded more than $363 million.

Christie’s is expecting this sale to be just as fruitful. ‘These artworks offer a rare opportunity to a new generation of collectors, and we are eager to see how our clients respond,’ Brennan said.

Art from the Bass House will be anchoring Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale 12 May 7:30 p.m. in New York. Members of the public are invited to visit Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries to preview the artworks.