$53 M. Wingate Collection Comes to Sotheby’s, Led by $25 M. Giacometti

David and Shoshanna Wingate’s collection of modern and contemporary art, created over seven years, will be sold at Sotheby’s in New York and London during evening and day sales on May 19 and 20. The collection of more than 50 works, which includes classic artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, Roy Lichtenstein, Kenneth Noland, Mark Rothko and Varvara Stepanova, is expected to sell for $37 million to $3,700. Between $53 million and $53 million.

Giacometti’s pieces dominate the collection, accounting for as much as half of its value. La Clairière (combination avec neuf figures)conceived in 1950 and cast in 1960; the project was expected to cost $18 million to $25 million. Other works by Swiss artists include Buste d’homme (New York I)estimated to be worth $2 million to $3 million.

“LaClaire Allegra Bettini, head of Sotheby’s Modern Evening Sale in New York, said in press materials: “‘Giacometti’ is one of those works that makes you stop dead in its tracks. Giacometti created this work by accident, but it feels completely inevitable – the nine figures seem to carry everything he would go on to explore for the rest of his career.”

The artist was working on some individual figures and one day, while clearing his workbench, he placed them on the floor and was struck by the arrangement preserved in the piece. “These are the first sculptures I wanted,” Giacometti wrote to his Paris dealer Pierre Matisse. Other examples of this version of the work are in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the Fondation Maggot in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.

Rothko’s Untitled (circa 1959), a luminous oil on canvas in his signature style of three stacked, blurry rectangles of color, is estimated at $5 million to $7 million. Wingate purchased the painting in 1976 at Sotheby’s Parke Bernet auction house in London. It appeared in the first exhibition devoted to Rothko’s paintings on paper, which ran in 1984-86 and originated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and visited major American institutions including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

David (1921-2011) was born in Israel and lived in Old Westbury, NY and Palm Beach, FL. The president of aerospace contractor Hi-Shear Industries, he began collecting stamps as a child and turned to art and design after graduation, often focusing on representations of the human figure, from Tiffany lamps to paintings by leading artists of the day. Shoshanna, a sculptor who was born in Syracuse, New York, died in January at the age of 104.

The couple began collecting after meeting pioneer New York dealer Edith Halpert and purchased many works by artists such as Ben Shahn, Abraham Rattner and William Zorach from her downtown gallery. Over the years, they expanded their collection to include works by important figures of the 20th century, including Giacometti, Kandinsky, Lichtenstein, and Pablo Picasso. The Wingates also assembled collections from European galleries. They bought Giacometti’s LaClaire According to their son Ealan Wingate, his work was exhibited at Galerie Maeght and Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris.

In 1971, at the age of 23, Ealan Wingate became the first director of legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend’s SoHo gallery. After working with his father at Hi-Shear Industries, Wingate Phils After opening his own gallery, Koury Wingate, which closed in 1990, he became director of Gagosian Gallery for 35 years. He led the team that created numerous books dedicated to artists with whom he collaborated, including George Baselitz, Cecily Brown, Howard Hodgkin, Anselm Kiefer, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly.

As Ealan Wingate explains, in a sense it is only fitting that the collection should go to auction. “Of course Dad bought things from a lot of galleries, but what he really loved was buying at auctions,” he told art news in an email. “He loved immediacy, competition and excitement, and he also appreciated accuracy in pricing. Most of his auction lots were purchased at Sotheby’s and early Parke Bernet sales. He bought his Stepanova and Rodchenko at an auction at Sotheby’s in Moscow.”

David Wingate once said, “Everything we buy is bought for enjoyment, not for investment into the coffers.”

“Dad’s greatest joy was bringing his new purchase home—choosing a place for it, hanging it up with other things, visiting it,” says Ilan Wingate. “His collection was a community of beautiful things. As he bought more contemporary works, he often hung his favorite paintings purchased decades ago on the walls alongside new ones: Abraham Rattner alongside Ed Ruscha.”

Their home in Old Westbury provides space to live in and display their collection, with sculptures by Giacometti and Picasso leaning against large windows overlooking a forest clearing, and Tiffany lamps paired with paintings by Morris Louis and Kenneth Nolan.

Ilan helped guide his parents in collecting more pop art and abstract works.

“I was fascinated by Andy Warhol, but Dad wasn’t,” he says. “He thought it wasn’t art, it was silly, it wasn’t what he liked. But he kept looking at it. One day around 1965 he came to me with a wink and showed me a wastebasket in the shape of a Campbell’s soup can that he had just bought for the office. That was his way of telling me that he was ready for Pop Art.”