Fashion Designer Marc Jacobs Is Selling Off His Entire Art Collection, Including a $3 Million Ed Ruscha

After nearly 20 years of collecting art, the fashion designer
Marc Jacobs is looking for a fresh start. As he prepares to sell
his New York City apartment, he’s also auctioning off all the art
hanging inside it. Sotheby’s has even named the New York sale “Marc
Jacobs: Between Collections.”

“Everything must go!” Jacobs joked to Sotheby’s Amy
Cappellazzo in an interview posted on the auction house’s
website. “Currins, Peytons, Ruschas!”

Jacobs was friends with the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and
Francesco Clemente coming up in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until 2000
that he finally felt confident enough to buy his first work of
art.

“I was always really intimidated by the art world,” Jacobs said
in the Sotheby’s interview. That first purchase was a trio of Mike
Kelley prints, two of which are being
offered in the contemporary art day auction on November 15 with estimates of $8,000–12,000.
Next came Karen Kilimnik’s Mary Calling Up a
Storm (1996), which could fetch up to $120,000.

Before long, the floodgates opened and Jacobs was a bonafide
collector. “I was very instinctive, and I just bought things that I
loved,” he told Sotheby’s. “Then I got to know these artists a
little bit—some a lot—and that fed my interest in their work.”

Earlier this year, the designer and his husband, Char
Defrancesco, bought a home in Rye, New York, and Jacobs put his
three-bedroom West Village
townhouse on the market in April for $15.9 million (the
price has since dropped to $14.5 million). Even before that, Jacobs
was already beginning to sell off his art as well.

At the March contemporary evening auction at Sotheby’s
London, Jacobs parted ways with a
number of pieces, including Basquiat’s Soothsayer for £759,000 ($1
million), Jeff Koons’s Yorkshire Terriers for
£855,000 ($1.26 million), and David Hockney’s The
Salesman for £350,000 ($460,000).

A pair of guaranteed photo paintings by Gerhard Richter, however, underwhelmed
bidders. According to Artnet News’s Colin
Gleadell, the works “barely recovered” what Jacobs had paid for
them five years earlier despite selling for £735,000 ($968,657) and
£1.15 million ($1.5 million).

Further sales followed over the course of the year, with Robert
Ryman’s Series #30
(White) fetching $800,000 at the auction
house’s contemporary art day sale
in New York in May. Jacobs also had nine lots in this month’s
contemporary art auction at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, led by
Currin’s The
Penitent for HK$17.57 million ($2.23 million).

Now, Jacobs is taking things to the next level for the November
auctions, offloading more than 150
works at the Impressionist and Modern art day sale, the
fine jewels auction, and the contemporary art day and evening
sales, as well as several online auctions. The top lot looks
to be Ed Ruscha’s She Gets Angry at
Him, with a top estimate of $3 million. Other artists
with works on offer include Urs Fischer, Andy Warhol, Francis
Picabia, François-Xavier Lalanne, Alberto Giacometti, and Marcel
Duchamp.

“I’m not Marie Kondo. I didn’t decide everything must go. I
thought about my role as an art collector,” Jacobs said of his
decision to sell. “As much as I will have a difficult time parting
with them, I just felt it’s time to give myself this window to
start again.”

See more photos of Jacobs’s home and art collection below.

The post Fashion Designer Marc Jacobs Is Selling Off His
Entire Art Collection, Including a $3 Million Ed Ruscha
appeared first on artnet News.