“Rarely do three well-known art collections come to the auction block in the same season. Even more rarely does one auction house get to sell them all. Starting Tuesday, Christie’s will offer several exceptional works, including a Toulouse-Lautrec painting of a red-haired model, one of the centerpieces of the recent exhibition ‘Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre’ at the Art Institute of Chicago; a 1954 Rothko inspired by Matisse’s 1911 ‘Red Studio’; and an abstract de Kooning from 1977 that has had only one owner: the artist’s lawyer, Lee V. Eastman. Experts at the auction house are trying not to gloat.”