As the United States heads into Labor Day weekend for the final gasps of summer, Christie’s announced on Saturday that it had secured the collection of Robert F. Weis and Patricia G. Ross Weis for its marquee November sales in New York, marking one of the first major consignments for the fall sales.
The Weis collection at Christie’s will represent 80 lots and has a valuation in excess of $180 million. It includes works from some of the 20th century’s most important art movements, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, with works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Mark Rothko hitting the block.
The works will be split across multiple auctions, with 18 going to a single-owner sale that will precede the house’s 20th-century evening sale, and the remaining works being divided between Christie’s postwar and contemporary day sale and its modern art day sale.
“The collection of Patricia G. Ross Weis and Robert F. Weis is both deeply personal and instilled with historical significance, tracing the evolution of modernism through best-in-class examples by 20th-century icons,” Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brennan said in a statement. “Patiently assembled over more than seventy years, the collection captures a rare sense of discovery—demonstrating refined connoisseurship, intellectual rigor, and the couple’s richly varied tastes.”
Among the works that will be on offer are Picasso’s 1932 painting La lecture (Marie-Thérèse), which carries an estimate upon request in the region of $40 million; Matisse’s Figure et bouquet (Tête ocre), with an estimate between $15 million and $25 million; Mondrian’s Composition with Red and Blue (1939–41), with an estimate of $20 million–$30 million; and Rothko’s 1958 No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), with an estimate upon request in the region of $50 million.
“To experience the Weis home was to follow the best of modernism from Paris to New York in the first half of the 20th century and to join Mr. and Mrs. Weis on their family’s seventy-year journey of curiosity and discovery,” Max Carter, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art, said in a statement. “A rare Fauve Braque overlooking the dining table led in the series of rooms beyond to the interwar masterpieces of Léger, Miró, Matisse, and Picasso and from there to Mondrian, Ernst, Gorky, Rothko, and Kline in America. In few collections of its time or since will you find such thoughtfulness, interconnection, and superlative quality.”
Robert Weis, who died in 2015 at the age of 96, was the former chairman of Weis Markets, which his father had founded in 1912 in Sunbury, Pennsylvania. Patricia Weis, who died in 2024, was Robert’s wife of 57 years. (Their son, Jonathan Weis, is now the supermarket chain’s chairman, president, and chief executive.)
According to a release, the couple were “equal partners in the collecting process” and would visit New York on the weekends and the United Kingdom and France during the summers in which they would amass their blue-chip collection. They were also major philanthropists in education, having donated to Yale University, Bard College, Franklin & Marshall College, and Susquehanna University.
In a statement, the couple’s three children, Colleen, Jennifer, and Jonathan Weis, said, “Growing up with our parents’ art collection has brought us great joy and created a lifelong interest and passion for art in the three of us. It has defined our family experience, and we have been lucky to live among these beautiful things. Our stewardship of them will pass to others who we hope will be equally inspired by the beauty and depth of feeling that the collection evokes.”
