On Thursday night in New York, at an auction house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Sotheby’s, the centuries-old British art broker, sold a painting by the late Mark Rothko for US$26.4 million or just under $35 million Canadian. That’s on the low end for a classic Rothko canvas these days. The painting — red and orange with a single bar of hazy blue — isn’t huge; it’s about five feet tall. And it’s never been owned by a major museum.

The Rothkos that have shattered art world records, paintings like the one that sold for an astonishing $115 million in 2012, tend to be much bigger. They tend to occupy the entire eye and overwhelm. They tend, in other words, to look a lot like the Rothko that’s sitting today in a storage room in Toronto, tucked away with the oddities and the other hidden works in the massive, mostly unseen collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The AGO’s Rothko, painted in 1962, hasn’t been on display in Toronto in years. It’s a decision that baffles the artist’s son. “I think (it) is easily one of the 20 greatest Rothkos ever painted. Maybe higher,” Christopher Rothko said in New York last week. “I’ve been to the AGO four times and it has never been on display. And I just don’t get it. It’s not like they have other Rothkos that are hanging. It’s not like they are hanging exclusively Canadian art.”