Mary Tyler Moore’s art collection heads to auction

Doyle Auctions will sell American television pioneer Mary Tyler Moore’s art collection and other belongings from her home in Greenwich, Connecticut next month. The nearly 300 lots include sculptures, paintings, jewellery and decorative objects. The sale will take place 4 June in New York, where Moore was born and raised.

Moore died in 2017 and is best remembered for starring in her own sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The show centred around Moore’s character Mary Richards, a single woman working as a news producer in Minneapolis. The depiction of an unmarried, independent woman was groundbreaking when the show premiered in 1970, and the series acknowledged topics that were controversial for the time like sex outside of marriage, birth control and homosexuality.

The two most valuable lots in the sale are both sculptures by Mimmo Paladino, the influential Italian Neo-Expressionist artist. Both are untitled 1987 works purchased at the New York gallery Sperone Westwater, with $50,000 to $70,000 estimates. One is a limestone and oil sculpture of a human-like form with elaborate carvings, and the other is a more Minimalist depiction of a figure with two faces. Moore also owned multiple examples of her own portrait by artists including the German American Pop artist Peter Max, the photographer Annie Leibovitz and Everett Raymond Kinstler, who painted the American presidents Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan’s official White House portraits.

The sale also includes some of Moore’s jewellery, including an 18-carat gold Tiffany cuff bracelet designed by Paloma Picasso, the daughter of Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot (the jewelry designer is currently loaning some of her art collection to a Gagosian show focused on her father). The bracelet is estimated to sell for between $6,000 and $8,000.

The largest part of the sale is made up of Moore’s furniture and decorative art pieces. There are also memorabilia connected to Moore’s decades-long Hollywood career, like a ticket for the live studio shoot of the Mary Tyler Moore Show’s final episode.

It’s not the first time work from Moore’s collection has gone up for sale—in 2018, a Richard Diebenkorn painting owned by Moore and her husband Robert Levine sold for $22.5m with fees at Christie’s New York.

Works destined for the Doyle auction are currently on show at the auction house’s Beverly Hills location (until 20 May) then will go on view in New York (30 May-2 June) ahead of the auction on 4 June.