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Joan Mitchell's Green Book of Barbara Guest: A Painting Named for a Poet Comes to Auction

Joan Mitchell painted Green Book of Barbara Guest around 1960 and named it for her friend, the poet and critic. Unseen in public for six decades, it makes its auction debut at Sotheby's New York on November 16, estimated at $12 million to $18 million.

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Joan Mitchell's titles usually point to landscapes and natural forms. Green Book of Barbara Guest points to a friend. Painted around 1960, the canvas takes its name from the poet and art critic Barbara Guest, a rare title that opens onto Mitchell's own circle rather than a place. It is a large painting, oil on canvas, 90 by 70 inches.

It belongs to a turning point. Mitchell had moved to Paris, and in 1960 she worked with John Ashbery on a book of poems. The painting comes from the start of her most celebrated period and first mature body of work, when her early 1960s canvases took on a new surge of motion. Knots of red, green, violet and black gather across a pale ground. Sotheby's specialist Courtney Kremers compares the composition to music or poetry: what looks like spontaneous paint is a run of careful decisions, with a rhythm the eye follows across the surface.

The painting stayed in Mitchell's own collection before entering the collection of Theodore and Ruth Baum, where it remained for four decades. It will be on public view for the first time in six decades and is coming to auction for the first time, as lot 9 in Sotheby's Vision: The Extraordinary Collection of Theodore and Ruth Baum Evening Auction in New York on Monday, November 16, 2026, at 6 PM EST, with an estimate of $12 million to $18 million. It is on view at 945 Madison Avenue through November 15.

The Baums began collecting contemporary art in 1983 with a red and orange 1967 Rothko on paper, which is also in the sale at $10 million to $15 million. The evening also includes Ed Ruscha's Dimple of 1964, Andy Warhol's The Scream (After Munch), Alberto Burri's GA1 and works by Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, a collection Sotheby's estimates at more than $100 million in total.

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