Jesús Rafael Soto’s Vibración, Bastones con Rojo (1964) belongs to the Vibraciones series, which Soto began in the late 1950s after the Plexiglas reliefs that helped launch kinetic art. The early Vibraciones used tangled wire and found metal; by 1964, Soto had pared the series down to free-moving rods suspended in front of a rigidly lined background.

Three vertical panels sit inside a deep black box, two lined with fine white horizontal stripes flanking a flat field of brick red. More than a dozen painted canes hang from nearly invisible threads, crossing at angles — white, silver, and gray at left, salmon through deep red at right. The slightest movement of air or of the viewer sets the stripes shimmering, and the canes seem to lose their solidity.

With Carlos Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero, Soto was one of the three founding figures of Venezuelan kinetic art. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou, among others.

Until 2005, it had only two owners. The first, Venezuelan banker and industrialist Pedro Vallenilla Echeverría, was an early Soto collector whose holdings form the core of the Cubist collection at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas. Barbara and John Duncan of New York followed; Barbara Duncan, an art historian, helped plan the first Latin American auction at Sotheby’s New York in 1979. For four decades, it stayed with collectors devoted to Latin American art.