The Taubman Collection

Before they are offered for sale in New York, the works in the collection accumulated by Alfred Taubman are being exhibited in world’s major art marketplaces. The Sotheby’s teams responsible for advertising the merits of each masterpiece to Hong Kong’s and London’s richest collectors are aware they are preparing a historic sale, as the Taubman Collection is indeed one of the finest American private collections.

Who was Alfred Taubman and what is the collection?

Alfred Taubman died on 17 April 2015 aged 91. He was perhaps better known as Sotheby’s Chairman and CEO than as a billionaire collector, and yet the quality of the works he collected over 50 years is worthy of the most demanding museums. Taubman bought his first works in the 1950s using a $5,000 loan. Soon after, he started buying art from the major dealers of the time, like Leo Castelli, and also at auctions. Later he made his fortune opening shopping centres in the United States. In 1983, Taubman bought Sotheby’s and became its CEO. Over the years, Alfred Taubman built up one of the world’s finest and most comprehensive private collections including, antiques, Old Masters, Impressionist and Modern art, American art and Contemporary art. This fabulous collection is due to be sold between early November 2015 and late January 2016 in four prestige sales orchestrated by Sotheby’s. The total estimated value of the approximately 500 works on offer is between $500 and 700 million. If the results comply, Sotheby’s will have sold the largest private collection in the world, generating a substantially higher total than the sale of the Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent collection in 2009 that was announced as the “sale of the century”.

The first of the four Sotheby’s sales on 4 November 2015 is titled Masterworks and will offer 70 lots with some highly prestigious signatures like Picasso, Miró, Modigliani, Degas, Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec. The highest estimates are for Pablo PICASSO’s Femme Assise sur une Chaise (1938), Willem DE KOONING’s Untitled XXI (1976) and Amedeo MODIGLIANI’s Portrait de Paulette Jourdain (1919). Each of these paintings is expected between $25 and $35 million. There will also be one of the most beautiful nudes by Edgar Degas still in private hands, Femme nue, de dos, se coiffant (Femme se peignant), carrying an estimate of 15- 20 million, as well as an Egon SCHIELE work on paper depicting a couple embracing (Freundin, Rosa-Blau, 1913) modestly estimated at $2.5 – 3.5 million (from a batch of 24 similar works from the same collection).

The sale’s proceeds will be used to settle estate fees and finance the A. Alfred Taubman Foundation, and the sale itself will kick off the first of New York’s biannual two-week periods of intense auction activity. This year, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips Impressionist & Modern and Post-War & Contemporary Art sales will be an excellent test of whether or not the global art market has been affected by financial problems (particularly in China).

Christie’s versus Sotheby’s: a Modigliani battle…

Amedeo MODIGLIANI’s Portrait de Paulette Jourdain (1919) – that Taubman acquired in 1983 from the Acquavella gallery – is making its first auction appearance at Sotheby’s with an estimate of around $30 million. If successful the painting would join the artist’s top 5 auction results. However, on 9 November, Christie’s is upstaging Sotheby’s with one of Modigliani’s most famous works, his Reclining Nude from 1917 – 1918. This Modern gem could fetch over $100 million and sign a new world record for the artist that currently stands at $70.7 million including fees for a stone sculpture, The Head (1911-1912), acquired in November 2014 at Sotheby’s New York. At the time, The Head became the third most expensive sculpture in the world.
Reclining Nude is quite simply one of the most important paintings of the Modern period. The work is part of a series of large female nudes made for Léopold Zborowski that caused a scandal nearly a century ago in his exhibition at the Berthe Weill Gallery in Paris. This formidable synthesis of French Modernism and Italian Mannerism is the centrepiece of the autumn sales.