The sale of The Emily Fisher Landau Collection was historic in more ways than one. On Nov. 8, it became the most valuable collection devoted to a woman collector when all 31 lots of the evening auction at Sotheby’s sold for a combined $406.4 million. The following afternoon, an additional 80 lots sold for $18.3 million during the day auction, bringing the collection’s total to $424.7 million.
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Highlighting the auctions was Pablo Picasso’s Femme à la montre, a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter from 1932, which sold for $139.4 million, the second highest price ever achieved for the artist at auction and the most valuable work of art sold at auction this year. Numerous other records were set, including with the collection’s next-highest lot, Jasper Johns’ Flags from 1986, which established a new high for a painting from his landmark series at $41 million. Rounding out the collection’s top three lots was Securing the Last Letter (Boss) by Ed Ruscha, an artist with whom Landau had a deep and lasting friendship. The painting sold for $39.4 million, the artist’s second-highest price at auction.
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
The works on offer at Sotheby’s comprised only a part of Landau’s full collection, hundreds of works from which now reside in The Whitney Museum of American Art, where she served as a trustee for decades. Laudau’s legacy ranks among that of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Peggy Guggenheim, Gertrude Stein and other great women collectors of the 20th century.
Landau, a New Yorker, died on March 27 in Palm Beach, Fla. She was 102. Landau used a Lloyd’s insurance settlement from a spectacular jewel heist in her apartment to fund what would become one of America’s premier collections of contemporary art.
Nick Hunt/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
From 1991 to 2017, Landau opened her collection of 1,200 artworks to the public in the Fisher Landau Center for Art, a repurposed former factory in Long Island City, Queens. In 2010, she pledged almost 400 works, then worth between $50 million and $75 million, to the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she had long been a trustee.
“I was devastated,” Ms. Landau said of the heist of emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds from her home in interviews conducted for a Whitney catalog, “Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection.” But, she added, “I decided that I didn’t want the jewelry any more. I now had seed money for a collection,” thanks to the insurance settlement.
“What I really wanted to buy was paintings,” she said, “so probably the theft was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
“Emily Fisher Landau’s prescient and unerring eye allowed us to shine a spotlight tonight onto the great artists who now form the bedrock of 20th century art history,” said Brooke Lampley, Sotheby’s Chairman and Head of Global Fine Art, after the evening auction. “As every single lot found a new home, we saw the enduring appeal of these masters affirmed once again.”
You May Also Like:
Warhol’s ‘Marilyn’ Sells for Record $195 Million
English
العربية
Nederlands
Français
Deutsch
Italiano
日本語
한국어
Русский
Español
Svenska
Türkçe
اردو
Tiếng Việt