During its New York design week (June 5–11), auction house Sotheby’s will offer art and design from the estate of revered art dealer Barbara Gladstone, who died in 2024 at age 89. The 140 lots on offer include contemporary art, modern and contemporary design, prints, and photographs and are estimated to bring between $6.9 and $10 million. The sale takes place on Tuesday, June 9, with a public preview exhibition opening June 2 at the house’s Madison Avenue headquarters.
The house previously sold a dozen contemporary artworks from Gladstone’s collection as part of a May 15 sale. Including pieces by Carroll Dunham, Sigmar Polke, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, Rudolf Stingel, and Andy Warhol, the group sold for $18.5 million (with fees) against a high estimate of $12 million (not including fees), with all finding buyers and 75 percent of them selling above their high estimate.
The art and design sale, in addition to works by artists such as Matthew Barney, Anish Kapoor, Alex Katz, Yayoi Kusama, Peyton, Prince, and Amy Sillman, includes significant pieces of midcentury European and Brazilian modernism by designers such as Pierre Jeanneret, Pierre Paulin, Jean Prouvé, Jean Royère, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Joaquim Tenreiro, and Paavo Tynell. Other pieces bridge the divide between art and design, such as a Scott Burton granite café table, a Damián Ortega wood chair sculpture, and Franz West chairs and dining table.
“When my colleagues in the contemporary art department brought me in to review the design pieces, I got excited because I feel like this collection speaks to a phenomenon of the growing momentum of integration between art and design,” Jodi Pollack, the house’s chairman of 20th-century design and chairman of major collections, Americas, told ARTnews.
Pollack cited two successful sales of art and design this spring: a New York sale from the collection of Jean and Terry de Gunzburg (she was a fashion magnate, he a biologist), led by a record-smashing set of Claude Lalanne mirrors, and a London sale from the holdings of British socialite and arts patron Pauline Karpidas. “This is exactly how collectors want to see art and design presented together,” she said, adding, “Barbara obviously saw this connection between art and sculpture and objects decades ago. She was immersed in this world.”
Richard Prince, Medusa (2003).
Leading the sale is Richard Prince’s Medusa (2003), from the artist’s “Hoods” series of sculptures, consisting of the hoods of American muscle cars. It’s expected to bring between $800,000 and $1.2 million. Other examples from the series figure in the collections of museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Two artworks bear high estimates of $600,000: Kai Althoff’s mixed-media Unter der Autobahnbrücke (2003), showing a group of people under an elevated roadway, and Alex Katz’s portrait Halsey 9 (2022).
Leading the design selections is a sideboard from ca. 1948 by French designer Jean Prouvé, whose design pieces have fetched prices as high as $1.7 million, the price achieved for a table at Sotheby’s New York in 2021, according to analytics company ARTDAI. The sideboard carries an estimate of $120,000 to $180,000.
Jean Prouvé, Sideboard (ca. 1948).
“There’s an incredible interest and influence of materiality and texture,” Lisa Dennison, Sotheby’s chairman, Americas, told ARTnews. “When I look at the Prince car hood, I see the slivery paint, and something that’s between art and architecture and sculpture, and the Prouvé cabinet that has similar coloration. I see beautiful echoes. I think Barbara appreciated echoes.”
