Big money expected at Rockefeller estate sale
Tonight in New York, Christie’s will embark on what promises to be the most valuable estate sale of art and antiques ever staged. The three-day auction comprising the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller (he died a widower last year, aged 101 and worth $3.3billion – £2.43billion), is officially estimated to fetch $650million (£480million), easily beating the 2007 sale of Yves Saint Laurent’s $484million art collection, which currently holds the number one slot.
We know the Rockefeller sale will trump that because it has all been guaranteed to sell, either by Christie’s themselves, or by third parties who have agreed to buy at certain prices.
As a result we are guaranteed record prices for paintings by Matisse, the pointillists, Paul Serusier and Georges Seurat, the Nabis group artist, Armand Seguin, and Jeanbaptiste-camille Corot.
Unpublished estimates on some paintings have been rising ever since the sale was announced, and guarantors moved in to back particular lots – essentially, a private auction before the public one.
A painting of waterlilies by Monet, for instance, was announced last November with a $35million estimate, but now has a $60$65million guideline. As the sale gets closer, a revised total nearer $1billion dollars by the end of the week looks ever more likely.
Christie’s has cleverly marketed the sale around a catchphrase playing on the world’s envy of wealth: “Live like a Rockefeller”.
And it’s more achievable than you might think. While billionaires compete for a $100million rose period Picasso of a naked young girl holding a bunch of flowers, less affluent buyers snap up stacks of pictures and furnishings in a simultaneous online sale. Many of these were estimated at under $1,000, but are already leapfrogging in price.
Some works have come down through David Rockefeller’s parents. His father, John “Junior”, was a lover of ceramics who famously had a different dinner service for every day of the week. John’s taste in art was diehard conservative, but his wife, Abby, was different. She sold one of their New York houses to build the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1929 and kept a private gallery of modern art at home.
David inherited his father’s conservative taste, but found in his wife, Peggy, whom he married in 1940, a more adventurous artistic spirit.
Their first house, in upstate New York’s Pocantico Hills, was American Georgian in style, and so suitable for the 18th-century English furniture and portraits he liked.
But when his mother died in 1948, and David took over as a trustee of MOMA, things changed.
With encouragement from Alfred Barr, the director of MOMA, he and Peggy bought their first Impressionist and postimpressionist paintings by Pissarro and Bonnard.
By 1951 they had acquired their first major Impressionist work, a seated girl in sunlight by Renoir, estimated tonight at $7million.
These paintings suited their more relaxed lifestyle. Peggy didn’t like her houses to look like museums, she was an interior designer and wanted things that felt homely and uplifting. The overriding impression one gets is of these paintings hung against warm yellow, crimson or wood panelled walls, invariably above a piece of classic 18th-century furniture or fireplace.
So, “Live like a Rockefeller” is not an invitation just to spend but to take refuge in the comforting beauty of modern, figurative art.