Christie’s to Auction Mann Photography Collection and AI Portrait

Christie’s is preparing a busy autumn season with several high-profile auctions. On October 4 and 5, the house will sell the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Collection of Photographic Masterworks, a renowned assembly of 19th- and 20th-century American photography. The collection includes works by Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Alfred Stieglitz, with Stieglitz’s The Terminal (1892), The Hand of Man (1902), and The Steerage (1907) among the highlights. The Manns, American philanthropists, began collecting in the 1970s. Separately, Christie’s will auction David Hockney’s 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), owned by magnate Joe Lewis, which may surpass Jeff Koons’s $58 million record. Additionally, on October 23, the house will offer Portrait of Edmond Belamy, an artwork created by the French collective Obvious using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) developed by Ian Goodfellow in 2014. The AI-generated painting, reminiscent of 19th-century portraits, has an estimate of $7,000.