Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
Paul Allen, S.I. Newhouse, Robert Mnuchin, Marian Goodman, Leonard Lauder, Barbara Gladstone: the list of collectors whose art has arrived at auction over the past two years reads like the society pages of decades past. Some died; others have merely reached an age when keeping several hundred million dollars’ worth of paintings around no longer seems quite as important as it once did.
This generation of collectors has become critical to the art market recovery—at least the one experienced by the major auction houses. The first six months of this year were the strongest for the major houses in years, with Christie’s reporting $4.5 billion in sales and Sotheby’s reporting $4.4 billion. That’s the strongest result in five years for Christie’s, and a record for Sotheby’s. But those totals, analysts have noted, were fueled more by extraordinary collections than by a return to the frothy post-Covid period.
Mari-Claudia Jiménez, a partner and head of Withers Art and Advisory and a former Sotheby’s executive, put a sharper point on it. “There is no question that the recovery of the market at this moment is entirely being driven by these collections,” she told me.
Why? Because the art market has a perpetual supply problem.
Great works have a habit of disappearing. They enter museums, where they may never be sold again, or the collections of wealthy people who may hold them for decades. “It’s very rare to find masterpieces anymore,” Jiménez said. Estates are the moment when “a plethora of fresh masterpiece trophy-level material” suddenly reappears.
This is especially important because the art market “correction” from 2023 through 2025 was concentrated at the top. In 2024, Clare McAndrew, author of the Art Basel & UBS Global Collecting Survey, told me that there weren’t necessarily fewer people willing to spend enormous sums on art; there simply weren’t as many enormously valuable things being offered to them.
Death has started to solve that problem, and it isn’t likely a one-off coincidence. We are in the early stages of the so-called Great Wealth Transfer, in which tens of trillions of dollars in assets will pass from the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers to their Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z heirs.
According to the Deloitte Private and ArtTactic Art & Finance Report, close to $1 trillion worth of art could transfer in the next decade. Some heirs will want the pictures, but plenty will want the money instead.
There is a nice bit of evidence for this in ARTnews‘s own archive: in 2020, we published a story titled “Estates in Waiting: Which Collectors Are Being Courted by Auction Houses and Museums?” Among the collections on the watch list were Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder and Paul Allen. Allen’s collection would eventually become the first single-owner sale to break $1 billion. Works from Leonard Lauder’s collection helped power Sotheby’s sales last fall with results nearly as good.
The heirs are only half the story. Jiménez pointed to collectors like Pauline Karpidas and Joe Lewis, who have sold major collections while still alive. “It’s the combination” of those two types of people that is seeding the market with fresh material, she said. “The people who have passed and the people who are sort of at the end of their collecting journey.”
Then there is the even less romantic reason: taxes.
Estate sales often come with financial obligations and deadlines that ordinary consignments do not, which can make certainty particularly valuable. Mitchell Zuckerman, a cofounder of Art Market Advisors and a former Sotheby’s executive, told me that executors and beneficiaries frequently choose guarantees.
“Very often, beneficiaries and executors from estates need to pay estate tax and they don’t want to take the risk of the thing not selling,” Zuckerman said. “And they’re prepared to pay the contingent costs of the guarantee. But many, many entire estates are guaranteed.”
That combination helps explain why estates are nearly perfect auction-house clients. An executor may have a deadline and dozens or hundreds of objects to dispose of. A good gallery can sell a Richter painting, but an auction house can sell the Richter, the furniture, the jewelry, the design, and whatever else is in the house, put dates on the calendar, and guarantee a minimum return. “It’s turnkey,” Zuckerman said.
No wonder Christie’s and Sotheby’s fight so hard for them.
The competition begins long before the auction. Sometimes families plan years ahead; sometimes a collection is in play only months before a sale, according to Madeline Lissner, executive vice president for Sotheby’s global fine art division. The houses pitch estimates, guarantees, marketing plans, and the global machinery required to turn somebody’s possessions into an event.
That machinery has also expanded to match the way great collectors actually collect. Major collections rarely fit neatly into a single auction category. The same person who owns a $50 million painting may also have furniture, jewelry, design, watches, coins, or objects worth a fraction of that amount. Lissner said that breadth has become part of the pitch: rather than forcing an estate to find separate sellers for different parts of a collection, a global auction house can handle nearly all of it.
“A lot of the collectors that we find, they’re not single-category collectors and they’re also not single-price-point collectors,” Lissner said. “They just as easily may own a $50 million painting as they’ll have a variety of items that will be $10,000 or $20,000.”
Selling everything under one roof also gives the houses something else to work with: the collector’s story. A collection can be marketed across paintings, design, jewelry, and collectibles as the product of a single taste, creating what Lissner called a “halo effect” around the entire estate.
For an estate, the financial terms carry particular weight. An executor has fiduciary obligations to beneficiaries and cannot necessarily turn down a materially better offer simply because he prefers the specialist across town. “You have to maximize value,” Jiménez said.
But money isn’t everything. Zuckerman breaks a pitch down into three broad components: the financial terms, the marketing, and the people in the room. Personal chemistry can swing a consignment even when another proposal is better on paper, because the specialists making the pitch will soon be making essentially the same pitch to prospective buyers.
Jiménez put it more bluntly: “The deal is only as good as the people who are selling your artworks.”
There is another commodity being sold, too: immortality.
For heirs, an estate sale can be the final public monument to a parent or grandparent. The catalogues, exhibitions, videos, and press campaigns transform the collector into a character: a person of taste, discernment, and vision. Jiménez said that storytelling can matter enormously to families because it creates a legacy that will remain searchable long after the collection has scattered. Sotheby’s sees a similar advantage in extending the story of a collector across categories, from paintings to design and collectibles.
Whether every collector deserves such hagiography is another question. The provenance of Newhouse or Allen can genuinely add something to a work. The provenance of an otherwise unknown plutocrat probably does not. Auction houses, naturally, are paid to suggest otherwise.
But the underlying supply is real, and it is unlikely to disappear soon.
Ten years ago, buyers under 40 represented less than 10 percent of Sotheby’s buyers, according to Lissner. Today they account for about 20 percent. The interesting question, then, is not whether the current generation of great collectors will die. Zuckerman, who has been in the auction business since the 1970s, offered the least sentimental answer to that: “There’s an unending supply of art-owning estates.”
The question is whether the next generation is interested in buying what’s for sale.
