Christie’s Is Selling a $50 Million Collection Featuring a Georgia O’Keeffe Flower Painting and a Moody Magritte

Works owned by the late Chicago collectors and philanthropists
James and Marilynn Alsdorf will appear at Christie’s New York in
several sales over the next few months. The collection, valued at
an estimated $50 million, includes Modern and Impressionist works,
ancient Asian art, and Old Master drawings.

“The Alsdorf collection is an example of cross-category
collecting at its finest,” said Christie’s chairman of the Americas
Marc Porter in a statement. “It is
crowned by masterpieces in the collecting realms of antiquities,
works on paper, European and Latin American art, and Indian and
Southeast Asian art.”

The couple married in 1952 and traveled around the world buying
art. “We looked for objects,” Marilynn Alsdorf once said, “to
delight our eyes and our souls.”

James Alsdorf was an investor and business executive who
served on US advisory committees under presidents Ronald Reagan and
George Bush. The couple were patrons of the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the University of Chicago’s Smart
Museum of Art. They are the namesake of the Art
Institute’s Alsdorf Galleries for Indian, Himalayan, and
Southeast Asian Art, which opened in 2009. James Alsdorf died
in 1990 at the age of 76. Marilynn Alsdorf was 94 when she died
this past August.

The first works from the collection will hit the auction block
next month during a week of 20th-century sales. Among the
highlights are Joan Miró’s ‘La Publicitat’ et le vase de
fleurs (1916–17), estimated at $2 million–$3 million;
Pablo Picasso’s Portrait de
Marie-Thérèse (1937), estimated at $800,000–$1.2 million;
and René Magritte’s Le seize Septembre (1957), which
could fetch upwards of $9 million.

The American art sale will include the Georgia O’Keeffe
painting Pink Spotted Lilies (1936), which has a
high estimate of $1.8 million, while Jean
Dubuffet’s Palinodie (1961) will feature in the
post-war and contemporary sale for an undisclosed price.

Another major lot, in the Latin American art auction, is Frida
Kahlo’s The Flower Basket
(1941), a rare oil-on-copper still life by the artist—one of only
two works of its kind that she ever made. It’s one of a pair
of Kahlo works in the sale, the other being Portrait of a Lady in
White (circa 1929), which carries a pre-sale estimate of
$3 million–5 million.

Following the November sales, works from the Alsdorf collection
by François Boucher, Giovanni Battista, and Giovanni Domenico
Tiepolo will appear in the house’s Old Master drawings sale in
January. Sales of the the collection will conclude in March, with
Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Himalayan, and Southeast Asian work on
offer during Asia Week.

The post Christie’s Is Selling a $50 Million Collection
Featuring a Georgia O’Keeffe Flower Painting and a Moody
Magritte appeared first on artnet News.