Whitney Sells de Kooning Gift Just Three Years After Receiving It

By Daniel Okafor

The Whitney Museum is sending Willem de Kooning's Yellow River (1958) to Christie's next week, just three years after formally accepting it as a gift. The estimate is $12 million to $18 million.

The painting appears in Christie's 20th century evening sale on November 17. Proceeds will benefit the museum's collection, according to Artnet News, which first reported the story and the auction house's catalog.

Yellow River is a large abstract canvas dominated by hefty sweeps of blue and yellow. It 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 enough that it hung at the foot of his bed, where he could see it every morning. That's devotion of a kind museum donors rarely advertise.

After Solinger died in 1996, the painting passed to his wife, Betty Ann Besch Solinger, who promised it to the Whitney in 2011. The museum exhibited the work that year. The gift wasn't formally completed until 2023, after her death in 2022. Now it's back on the market, apparently for keeps.

Why is the Whitney selling?

This isn't the museum's first experiment with deaccessioning — the practice of selling works from a permanent collection. In 2023, the Whitney sent paintings by Edward Hopper, Maurice Prendergast, John Marin and others to Sotheby's. That group was led by Hopper's Cobb's Barns, South Truro (1930–33), estimated at $8 million to $12 million.

Jane Panetta, then the Whitney's curator and director of the collection, told ARTnews 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."

The Whitney's 2023 Collection Strategic Plan recommended making deaccessioning a regular part of its collecting strategy, particularly in areas where holdings are already substantial. The museum still owns several major de Koonings, including Door to the River (1960), from roughly the same period as Yellow River. Redundancy, it seems, has a price.

What makes the painting valuable?

Painted in 1958, Yellow River comes from a pivotal moment in de Kooning's career, when he moved away from the figures of his celebrated "Woman" paintings toward increasingly abstract compositions inspired partly by the landscape and highways around New York. The canvas was included in his 1959 show at Sidney Janis Gallery, where, according to Christie's, 19 of the 22 works had sold by noon on opening day.

Deaccessioning remains contentious in the museum world. The Association of Art Museum Directors permits proceeds to fund new acquisitions or the direct care of collections. The Whitney's own policy says works are intended to remain in the collection permanently, while sales that improve or refine its holdings are generally acceptable. On November 17, we'll learn what a spare de Kooning fetches when the market, not the foot of a bed, decides.