A big part of New York’s fall art-auction season is shaping up to be a face-off between Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales of artworks from high-flying collections assembled by two high-profile Chicago couples.
“It really speaks to Chicago being a great center as a collecting community, because of the great institutions that are there, the great galleries,” said Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art. “It’s very exciting.”
Sotheby’s New York kicked off the action in September with its unveiling of the Nov. 20 and 21 sale of 19th- and 20th-century paintings and sculptures from Chicago residents Cindy and Jay Pritzker. The 37 works — which includes Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh — have an estimated value of $120 million.
Christie’s jumped into the fray Oct. 6 with an announcement that more than 40 works from Chicago philanthropists and collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson will be auctioned across two sales Nov. 19 and 20. The 20th- and 21st-century works have an estimated value of more than $40 million.
Edlis, who passed away in 2019 at age 94, was a native of Austria who fled the Nazis with his mother and two siblings in 1941. He founded Apollo Plastics in 1965 and with Neeson began seriously collecting art in 1977 with their purchase of a major painting by geometric abstractionist Piet Mondrian.
In a statement provided to the Sun-Times via Christie’s, Neeson said: “Stefan’s and my collecting journey was one of the most exciting and gratifying chapters of our lives. We built a creative and intellectual life in Chicago alongside the many collectors, artists and art professionals here, and we were lucky to meet so many wonderful friends around the U.S. and abroad.”
In 2015, the couple donated 44 contemporary works estimated at the time to be worth $400 million to the Art Institute of Chicago. “It is a group of objects that no amount of money today could replicate given the current marketplace,” James Rondeau, then the museum’s curator of contemporary art, said at the time. “These are the icons of the 20th century.” Since 2016, the gifts, which included examples by Eric Fischl, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter and Cindy Sherman, have been featured on the second floor of the museum’s Modern Wing.
The top Christie’s lot from the Edlis-Neeson Collection will be Andy Warhol’s “The Last Supper” (1986), a 40-by-40-inch acrylic painting in an “electric yellow hue” that features his signature screenprint technique. It is estimated to sell for $6 million to $8 million.
Also included are major works by such noted artists as George Condo, John Currin, Ed Ruscha and Richard Prince as well as a patinated bronze and glass console table (ca. 1977) by Diego Giacometti that blurs design and sculpture.
“It’s the most exciting group of contemporary art this season,” Friedlander said. “And when I say contemporary, I mean art of the collector’s time that was acquired during his life. Stefan and Gael had many passions, but they were contemporary to the very end, which is very rare for collectors of that generation.”
According to Neeson, proceeds from this sale will largely be put toward the family’s charitable pursuits.