It’s official: Sotheby’s secured legendary dealer Barbara Gladstone’s collection and will present twelve works in a single-owner sale during its May marquee auctions. The sale follows Gladstone’s passing last June at the age of 89 and is expected to generate totals in excess of $12 million. “It takes some wisdom to steer a path through what everyone else wants you to do and what serves you best,” Gladstone once said. “There’s no formula. I trust my instincts.”
Lisa Dennison, chairman of Sotheby’s America, said in a statement that Barbara Gladstone’s collection was also shaped by the relationships she established and the artists she supported. For Gladstone, collecting art and running a gallery were inseparable pursuits—two sides of a lifelong commitment to artists who redefined the notion of art and expanded the possibilities of expression to respond to their time.
Indeed, socially engaged practices have always been at the heart of Gladstone’s program, which consistently championed institutionally celebrated artists who addressed urgent societal and political issues from the AIDS crisis to ecological disaster, war and grief—cementing her stature not just as a powerhouse dealer and tastemaker but also a vital cultural producer.
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Gladstone Gallery’s roster includes some of the most celebrated artists of our time, from those the gallery supported from its founding in 1989, like Matthew Barney, Joan Jonas, Carroll Dunham, Thomas Hirschhorn and Carrie Mae Weems, to contemporary visionaries such as Anicka Yi, Wangechi Mutu and Philippe Parreno. The gallery also represents major estates, including those of Keith Haring and Robert Rauschenberg—the latter of whom will be spotlighted this May in New York with a landmark survey of his sculpture practice—the first in three decades—covering work from the 1950s through the 1990s.
“Barbara Gladstone changed what it meant to live with art—and what it meant to believe in it,” Dennison added. “Each piece is meaningful, lived with, and reflects a collector who saw something unique in it. These works stand as its most powerful expression, offering us a profound new lens into who she was as a collector and her enduring legacy.”
True to her famously strategic thinking, Gladstone planned her succession before her passing, naming four partners to carry her vision forward: Max Falkenstein now leads the gallery, with Gavin Brown (who joined after closing his own gallery in 2020) overseeing artist relations and development, Caroline Luce managing operations and human resources and Paula Tsai heading up Asia and communications.
Gladstone’s collection will hit the block alongside another major trove: the art collection of Israeli art dealer and Luxembourg+Co founder Daniella Luxembourg, which is expected to generate a projected $30 million.
Highlights from Barbara Gladstone’s collection
Scheduled for May 15 at 6:30 p.m., the single-owner Selections from the Collection of Barbara Gladstone sale will open with a sentimental, intimate-scale painting by Elizabeth Peyton: Lohengrin (est.: $600,000-$800,000), which was inspired by Richard Wagner’s opera.
Leading the auction will be two seminal pieces by Richard Prince, whom she championed early on. The first is Man Crazy Nurse, a monumental work exhibited in Gladstone’s legendary 2003 “Nurse Paintings” show and estimated to fetch $4 million to $6 million. Inspired by the pulp covers of mid-century romance novels, Prince deployed his postmodern strategies here to elevate and dismantle mass culture’s kitsch, unmasking the embedded narratives of gender, desire and fantasy. Borrowing from Peggy Gaddis’s novel of the same name and transforming it with visceral layers of paint, Prince’s Man Crazy Nurse both critiques and celebrates American visual culture, paying sly homage to the New York School while subverting the sleek artifice of pulp fiction.
Sotheby’s will also offer Are You Kidding? (1988), one of Prince’s most important monochromatic Joke paintings. Appearing at auction for the first time, this painting (est.: $2.5-3.5 million) typifies Prince’s deadpan humor and conceptual finesse, transcribing a gag line in vibrant yellow onto an ultramarine background. Here, Prince collapses high and low culture with minimalist wit, reminding us that meaning often resides in the simplest gestures.
A rare black version of Andy Warhol’s Flowers series, created in 1964, will also go on the block, coming to auction with high expectations. One of only four examples of its type, the work has a high estimate of $1.5 million. Featuring inky black blooms against vivid green, the composition channels a poisonous glamour, revealing the vanitas undertones that have always pervaded Warhol’s Pop surfaces. Conceived in the wake of his Death and Disaster series, the piece lays bare Warhol’s obsession with mortality and the fleeting nature of existence.
A more subtly provocative work by Mike Kelley from the Memory Ware series will also be offered in the sale with a $1 million high estimate. In Memory Ware Flat #42 (2003), Kelley embedded a diverse set of decorative found objects and household items into plaster or clay, creating an independent aesthetic constellation of sense that both celebrates the beauty in the ordinary and addresses the chaotic nature of existence. Inspired by the memory wares Kelley saw at antiques fairs while creating a dialogue with the history of post-war abstraction, the piece collapses distinctions between folk art and high art, acknowledging the possibility of a more popular and accessible language of materials investigation.
A much anticipated lot is Rudolf Stingel’s self-portrait Untitled (Bolego)—arguably one of the artist’s most intimate psychological works—which is expected to sell for between $1.5 million and $2 million. Here, Stingel depicts himself drinking wine and smoking, a wry investigation of identity, habit and myth. Flirting with the idea of the artist as both decadent hero and tragic figure, Bolego was first shown at the 2006 Whitney Biennial and has been described by curator Francesco Bonami as “the history of melancholia,” a testament to the artist’s obsession with memory and the passing of time.
Additionally, riding the wave of a market rise, Sotheby’s will offer a large embroidery by Alighiero Boetti, Senza titolo (Seguire il filo del discorso. Tra l’incudine e il martello. Cinque x cinque venticinque…), which will most likely exceed its pre-sale estimate of $400,000-$600,000. Other works in the sale include an On Kawara black painting, 8 August 1975 (est.: $300,000-$400,000), a small Thomas Schütte Brancusi-inspired sculpture of a red head (est.: $200,000-$300,000), a group of seven works on paper by Raymond Pettibon (est.: $80,000-$120,000) and a signature work by Sigmar Polke, Untitled from 1996 (est.: $400,000-$600,000).
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