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New York’s Design Sales Offered a Clearer Picture of What Serious Collectors Want

With Barbara Gladstone's category-blurring collection and works by Giacometti, Royère, Bertoia and contemporary names, Sotheby's and Phillips delivered.

On the heels of the $96 million, all-time record-setting Collection of Jean & Terry de Gunzburg – Design Masters sale led by Claude Lalanne’s $33.5 million mirrors, Sotheby’s June Design Week generated a combined $27,568,552 across a three-day series of auctions. The summer auction round kicked off on June 9 with the $8.8 million Art & Design from the Collection of Barbara Gladstone sale, followed by the $10.5 million Of Form and Color: Art and Design from the Emmanuel de Bayser Collection sale on June 10, with the $17.07 million Important Design sale on June 11, which presented pieces from the defining aesthetic movements of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Meanwhile, Phillips’ Design sale on June 12 realized $2.9 million, with an 89.5 percent sell-through across its 76 lots, with most meeting or exceeding their high estimates.

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Barbara Gladstone’s eye for design

Opening the June design round, the highly anticipated trove of 140 lots from legendary dealer Barbara Gladstone squarely met its presale estimate of $6.9-10 million with a solid group of design, prints and photographs that proved how her eye for fine and pioneering practices extended well beyond her ability to pick and champion artistic talent. Most of the design pieces in the sale exceeded estimates, led by one of Jean Prouvé’s most desirable sideboards, the BA-12, dated circa 1948, which fetched $294,400 against a $120,000-180,000 estimate. Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann’s pair of “Rendezvous Pêcheurs de Truite” armchairs more than quadrupled their high estimate, selling for $140,800 (est. $20,000-30,000), while Greta Magnusson-Grossman’s low table climbed to $20,480 from a $5,000-7,000 estimate. Other top lots included Jean Royère’s occasional table, which, after several seasons of strong results, easily exceeded its estimate to sell for $40,960 (est. $25,000-35,000), while a table lamp by Mathieu Matégot doubled its high estimate, achieving $20,480, as did the Alexandre Noll lamp, which sold for $38,400 (est. $10,000-15,000). A fantastical Otto Schulz “Paradise” cabinet sold for $44,800, well above its $20,000-30,000 estimate. A pair of “Tre Pezzi” armchairs by Italian designers Franco Albini and Franca Helg sold for $24,320, surpassing a $12,000-18,000 estimate.

The top lot by value, however, was on the art side: Richard Prince’s Medusa from his Hood series, which landed within estimate at $1,024,000 with fees. But the other highly anticipated lot, Alex Katz’s portrait Halsey 9 (2022), was withdrawn after failing to find a buyer within its $400,000-600,000 estimate.

The artworks in the sale, which outnumbered the design pieces, tended to blur the line between categories. One was the set of six unique “Elliptoeder” chairs by artist Franz West, which sold for $70,400 against a $30,000-50,000 estimate, followed by a table that sold for $24,320. Two “Bunter Stuhls” by West also sold at around the high estimate for $16,640.

Opening the sale, a fresh-to-auction minimal black-and-white graphite-on-paper composition by American abstract painter Myron Stout, dated 1976, fetched $128,000 against a modest $5,000-7,000 estimate, while a pair of ceramic vases by Italian artist Fausto Melotti nearly doubled their high estimate to sell for $23,200. Carroll Dunham’s oil on linen, which Gladstone had acquired directly from the artist in 2015 after showing it at the gallery in 2012, met its high estimate, selling for $358,400, as did Alpha, which sold for $294,500 with fees, and Amy Sillman’s painting sold for $230,400 with fees. An additional Prince painting sold for $166,400, and another, Which Side Are You On?, achieved $256,000, while an ink-on-paper work by Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow—acquired by Gladstone from Parisian Galerie Loevenbruck, which is currently staging a show of the artist—flew to $61,440, doubling a $30,000 high estimate.

Lygia Clark’s seminal 1964 Estrutura de caixas de fósforos met its high estimate at $121,600, and the Daniel Buren, with an estimate on request, sold for $134,400. Gladstone also had iconic Yayoi Kusama pumpkins in her collection, with a larger signed and dated 1983 example selling at $153,600 with fees, and a group of three selling for $230,400 against a $60,000-80,000 estimate. Several ceramic pieces in the selection performed well amid the current market enthusiasm for the medium. Among them, a group by William J. O’Brien, who has also shown at the gallery, all met or exceeded........

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