Article content continued

My favourite salvo was from the letter write who worried about “the gullibility of our National Gallery personnel.”

Click here to see Mark Rothko’s No. 16.

What wisdom 24 years do bring. Recently, a senior member of today’s National Gallery personnel mentioned to me, off the record, that Voice of Fire is “worth well over $40 million today.”

In fact, earlier this year a Newman painting sold at auction in New York City for $84.2 million US (the currency of international art sales). That doesn’t mean Voice of Fire is worth as much, but it’s very conservative to estimate its value at $50 million US. Not a bad return on $1.76 million CDN over 24 years.

What about No 16?

It’s long been easy to see how extraordinary lucrative this investment of taxpayer dollars has been, as Rothko’s prices have risen exponentially. The gallery paid $1.8 million CDN for the Rothko painting in 1993. In 2005 a Rothko sold at auction for $22.5 million US. In 2007, another Rothko sold for $72.8 million US. Most recently, in 2012, another Rothko record was set when a painting sold for $86.9 million US.

This doesn’t prove that No 16 is worth $87 million US, but the sales cited in the previous paragraph are from the same period and in the same style as is No. 16, so it is conservative to estimate the current value of No. 16 at $60 million US.

Major art galleries don’t talk about the monetary value of their works, so they won’t “influence the market,” as a curator in Ottawa once explained to me. That’s in one way unfortunate, as those taxpayers who don’t “get” abstract art might be won over by knowing their dollars were invested wisely. You don’t have to “get” No. 16 or Voice of Fire to appreciate that less than $4 million CDN has been turned into more than $100 million US, a gain that increases healthily every year.

Gullible is not a word I’d apply to the people who brokered that deal: genius is a better fit.