Sotheby's to Auction David M. Solinger's $100M+ Contemporary Art Collection

Sotheby's will auction the David M. Solinger collection across four sales in New York and Paris, starting November 14, 2022. The contemporary art evening sale on November 14 in New York leads the cycle, followed by modern and African/Oceanic/Americas sessions on November 15 and 22, and a Paris contemporary evening sale on December 6. Over 90 lots are estimated at over $100 million. Highlights include Willem de Kooning's Collage (1950) estimated at $18-25 million, Pablo Picasso's Femme dans un fauteuil (1927) at $15 million, Alberto Giacometti's Trois hommes qui marchent (grand plateau) (1952), and Joan Miró's Femme, étoiles (1945). Solinger, a lawyer and former president of the Whitney Museum of American Art (first non-Whitney family member), built a museum-quality collection focused on postwar art, including European masters like Picasso, Giacometti, and Paul Klee, as well as French avant-garde artists Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, and Georges Mathieu. He donated works to the Whitney, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Cornell University, where the collection was last exhibited in 2002. The sale follows the Macklowe collection, which achieved over $922 million for Sotheby's.