The Wall Street Journal has a good preview of the upcoming sale of David Rockefeller at Christie's later this month. It has the potential of being the first $1 Billion art auction. According to the WSJ there are over 1500 lots, and a rumored guarantee of at least $650 million. Guarantees are typically at the lower end of the estimate range, and the WSJ also notes Christie;s took out a line of credit to promptly pay the consignors.
The Wall Street Journal reports
Source: The Wall Street JournalA CENTURY AGO, Standard Oil baron John D. Rockefeller became one of the world’s first billionaires at a time when the U.S. government’s annual budget hovered at around $700 million. This month, the vast art collection amassed by his grandson David Rockefeller could make history of its own by selling for as much as $1 billion at Christie’s in New York. No other estate auction has ever crossed that mark.
Then again, no other Gilded Age dynasty has ever conjured a vision of wealth quite like the Rockefellers, a surname that still serves as a byword for affluence. David Rockefeller, the former chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank who led his extended family for decades until he died a year ago at age 101, lived up to the Rockefeller reputation, maintaining a lifestyle worthy of a genteel monarch. He inherited art but soon developed his own taste, outfitting his four homes between Maine and Manhattan with lush masterpieces by Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Gilbert Stuart, Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe.
He and his wife of 56 years, Peggy, also accrued 67 porcelain dinner services, including a Sèvres set that Napoleon had taken with him in exile on Elba. They were given a woven picnic basket as big as a park bench by King Hassan II of Morocco. Years after Peggy died in 1996, David still carried on their tradition of weekend tours around their country estates in one of the antique horse-drawn carriages he collected.
When he died, his personal fortune stood at around $1.6 billion. By that point, Rockefeller had already given $1.4 billion to philanthropic causes aimed at education, nature conservation and cultural institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, which was co-founded by his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, in 1929. His will stipulated bequests of another $650 million, so he and advisers from Christie’s agreed to sell off nearly everything in his personal estate after his death, with all the proceeds to be donated—a charity auction to top them all.
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Earlier this year, one of his daughters, Peggy Dulany, who has her mother’s curly bob and casual comportment, stopped by one of the sale’s beneficiaries, the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. The nonprofit farm is located in Pocantico Hills, New York, about an hour north of New York City, and Dulany had arrived for a board meeting at the center, where she now serves as chair. Dulany’s son, Michael Quattrone, pulled up soon after in a Ford Explorer that bore a bumper sticker reading, STOP TEXTING!
The pair, like many of the 270 descendants of John D. Rockefeller, are still processing what it means to see the bulk of the Rockefeller collection scattered for good. Already, most of the heirs of David’s six children live comparatively unassuming lives, devoting their time to various philanthropic causes as they have been trained to do since childhood. (Dulany is the third of Peggy and David Rockefeller’s four daughters—Abby is the oldest daughter, born in 1943, followed by Neva, while the youngest is Eileen, born in 1952. There are also David Jr. and their late brother Richard, who died in a plane crash four years ago.)
Growing up, Dulany said her parents nudged her to give away a tenth of her allowance to the church, and she later taught her son to give away a portion of his own allowance as well. “I got a dime a week and he got a dollar,” she says. Quattrone grins and says, “Inflation.”
Unlike many families who squabble or sue over the dispersal of a blue-chip art collection, the Rockefellers had always made their altruistic intentions clear, says Dulany. “We knew the plan all along, so we never expected to inherit the art,” she says.
Yet for outsiders who have spent years tracking the swelling opulence of the Rockefellers, the moment seems weighty. “It feels like the passing of the torch from the gentlemen connoisseurs of the tycoon era to today’s markets-driven collectors who keep one eye on the investment values of their holdings,” says Evan Beard, national art services executive at U.S. Trust. “Most collectors have never seen how a Rockefeller really lived.”
Rockefeller tried to navigate the art world discreetly, but the arc of his collecting has become the stuff of legend among the New York establishment. Born in 1915, the youngest of six, he grew up in a nine-story townhouse on West 54th Street, a site that later became the sculpture garden for MoMA. He started collecting beetles at around age 7, eventually gathering 150,000 specimens, but he didn’t really get serious about collecting anything besides bugs until after he got married in 1940. (The insects were bequeathed to Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.) When his mother died in 1948, he took her place on MoMA’s board and befriended the museum’s director, Alfred Barr, who suggested he take a closer look at the impressionists.
Rockefeller’s son David Jr. was 10 years old when the bland equestrian paintings started coming down and masterpieces started going up. “People came by and said, ‘You can do better than this,’ and they did,” he says, “but I doubt my father spent seven figures on any one painting. Back then, $10,000 was a big price.”
From the early 1950s on, Rockefeller and his wife carefully and steadily gathered a museum’s worth of art for themselves. Eileen says she remembers art getting uncrated at a regular clip in those days, including Monet’s 1914–17 Water Lilies, which “just showed up” one afternoon on the stairwell of Hudson Pines, their home in Westchester County, New York. (Christie’s estimates that the painting will sell for $50 million.)
Eileen says her mother, who liked to paint watercolors, was as actively involved as her father; the couple agreed they each had veto power over any art the other wanted to buy.
In 1968, the Rockefellers made one of their savviest purchases when the estate of Alice B. Toklas, the longtime partner of writer and collector Gertrude Stein, became available. The art Stein had amassed ranked among the best in modern art history—Cézannes and Picassos galore—but the estate was valued at $6.8 million, then a princely sum. No collectors could imagine buying all of it outright, so Rockefeller formed a syndicate with a few other major collectors, including television tycoon Bill Paley and investor and publisher John Hay “Jock” Whitney, to buy the art and divvy up pieces by placing numbers in a hat. Rockefeller drew the first pick, and he and Peggy chose Picasso’s rose-period portrait Young Girl With a Flower Basket, from 1905, widely considered to be the gem of Stein’s collection.
Upon bringing it home, Peggy noticed that the flowers sprouting from the basket in the Picasso piece matched the crimson sand in a Paul Gauguin beach scene, The Wave, which they had bought the year before. Soon the works hung near each other, the walls surrounding them painted a similar hue. “That’s how important the art was to her,” Eileen says. “She wanted the walls to match.” For decades after, even as other rooms were updated, Peggy never touched the décor.
On the rare occasion the couple disagreed on an artwork, their children said their father typically took the piece to his office at the bank—or lent it to one of the children. That’s how David Jr. got to spend 40 years living with Picasso’s 1961 Woman With Dog Under a Tree, an image of the artist’s lover painted with a contorted, funhouse face that his parents lent him soon after he built his first house. “My mother thought it was misogynistic,” he says.
After Peggy died at age 80, the children said their father tried to keep up with contemporary art trends, seeing shows in New York’s gallery districts of SoHo and Chelsea, but he didn’t buy much—an antique chair, a Vincent van Gogh drawing, a Chinese vase. Dulany says he always took greater comfort in the impressionists he had bought at the outset, when collecting still felt new.
THE ROCKEFELLER sale is arriving at a time when the art market overall is on an upswing, fueled by an influx of new and seasoned international buyers and epitomized by the $450 million Christie’s sale last fall of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, or Savior of the World. Now that a single painting has sold for close to a half billion dollars, it no longer seems a stretch to wager that the Rockefellers’ entire collection of 1,562 lots of fine and decorative art could sell for twice as much, dealers say.
There hasn’t been a rose-period Picasso to rival Young Girl With a Flower Basket since Sotheby’s sold the artist’s 1905 Boy With a Pipe 14 years ago for $104 million, an auction high at the time for any artwork. Christie’s has priced this one to sell for at least $90 million. A Georges Seurat sailboat scene estimated to sell for at least $40 million, The Port of Grandcamp, debuted in an 1886 Paris show of neo-impressionist work alongside the artist’s famed park scene, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, which now belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.
The marketplace also hasn’t seen a brightly patterned Matisse on par with Rockefeller’s 1923 Reclining Nude With Magnolias in several decades, dealers say. The Matisse, which once hung in Rockefeller’s living room at his Westchester County home, is estimated to sell for at least $70 million.
New York collector Agnes Gund, MoMA’s president emerita, said she covets Lilies and Roses, a small 1882 floral still-life by Édouard Manet that hung in the foyer of Rockefeller’s East 65th Street townhouse. He inherited the bouquet from his mother; it’s estimated to sell for at least $7 million. “I used to joke with David that if that Manet ever went missing, he would know who stole it,” Gund says. “I’d love more than anything to get it, but I know I won’t because his paintings are going to sell so high. They’re going to fly.”
The pull of a Rockefeller provenance has been tested before, notably a decade ago when Rockefeller consigned Mark Rothko’s 1950 White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) to Sotheby’s. He had paid less than $10,000 for it in 1960. Friends say he was impressed by Sotheby’s $40 million estimate—and he was shocked when it sold for $72.8 million, a record at the time for any contemporary work of art. (A portion of the proceeds went to charity.) More recently, Christie’s sold a Botticelli portrait, Madonna and Child With the Young Saint John the Baptist, that had once belonged to Rockefeller’s father—and was dubbed the Rockefeller Madonna—for $10.4 million, doubling its low estimate.
This time around, a more acute test of the Rockefeller draw will come with their sprawling porcelain and furniture collections, categories whose prices and popularity lag far behind contemporary art. William Stafford, a Christie’s decorative arts expert, said the highest estimate among the roughly 250 pieces of furniture up for bid will be $70,000 for a pair of Queen Anne stools, far less than masterpiece-level furniture can fetch. One of the least expensive items in the estate also shows up in this segment, a Windsor-style child’s chair estimated to sell for at least $200.
Yet the 320 lots of dinner services, animal figurines and Chinese-export pieces could prove a wild card because of their quirky back stories. The family, starting with John D. Rockefeller, “seemed not to be able to turn down porcelain,” according to the family historian, Peter Johnson. One year for Christmas, David Rockefeller bought Peggy a pair of 1755 soup tureens shaped like googly-eye flounders with seaweed-style lid handles and spoons in the form of eels. “She absolutely loved them,” Johnson says, adding that she used them for everyday dining as well as special occasions. The tureens are estimated to sell for at least $80,000.
Subsequent generations of Rockefellers have since joined in, gathering so many examples of one 19th-century pattern with a gold-band border and hand-painted Chinese domestic scenes that collectors now call it the Rockefeller pattern. In April 2017, a complete dinner service sold for $1 million at Christie’s, tripling its low estimate. Michael Cohen, a London dealer in Chinese porcelain, says Chinese buyers have lately gravitated to the pattern, charmed by the fact that every hand-painted scene differs slightly. The ties to Rockefeller also help, Cohen says, adding, “For some, provenance can be more valuable than the pieces themselves.”
Christie’s, whose New York sale room is in Rockefeller Center, went to extraordinary lengths to win the right to sell the property, forging friendships with David Jr., who now heads the family, and donating to Oceana, a marine-conservation nonprofit where he serves as a director. Still, the house had to take additional measures to best Sotheby’s in a six-month contest that ended in the summer of 2013—four years before David Rockefeller died.
Rockefeller relied heavily on Richard Salomon, his longtime investment adviser, to negotiate terms with Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, and Stephen Brooks, the house’s deputy chief executive officer. While the executives decline to discuss specifics, several people familiar with the deal terms said the auction house guaranteed the family that the Rockefeller estate would sell for at least $650 million—double the house’s initial offer. (Guarantees typically hover around a consignment’s low estimate.)
In a rare twist, the estate asked Christie’s to ensure that the Rockefellers would be paid in a timely manner by securing an outside line of credit from a bank to cover the guarantee, according to the people familiar with the terms. Such deal-sweeteners are common in major merger deals but are almost unheard of in the auction industry; it means the house is on the hook to pay the family the final price for a work even if its winner tries to renege or seek a lengthy payment plan. According to a former auction-house executive, blockbuster consignment deals like this are rarely moneymakers for the auction house—$4 million in profit would be a coup in this case, the executive said—but the Rockefeller deal also wove in incentives so the house could reap far more if, say, the sale total surpasses expectations. (The current auction titleholder, Yves Saint Laurent’s estate, reaped $484 million nine years ago.)
In fact, portions of Rockefeller’s collection aren’t even headed for sale, as dozens of pieces were already doled out to museums. MoMA received more than 50 artworks, including Paul Cézanne’s 1888–90 pensive portrait Boy in a Red Vest, which was originally owned by Monet and likely would have sold for more than $200 million. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts was bequeathed four pieces, including Maurice de Vlaminck’s colorful Parisian street scene from 1905, Suburban Landscape. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where generations of Rockefellers have donated all manner of pieces—from medieval tapestries like The Hunt of the Unicorn at the Met’s Cloisters to African and Asian art—got Rockefeller’s Manet table scene The Brioche.
Additional treasures pack Kykuit, the Rockefellers’ 40-room Georgian Revival mansion situated high above the Hudson River near Tarrytown, New York, where the robber baron who started it all retired in 1913. The home, whose Dutch name is pronounced KIGH-kut and means “lookout,” is now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and peers down onto a 300-acre family compound dotted with sculptures by Henry Moore, Constantin Brancusi and David Smith, collected mostly by Rockefeller’s older brother, Nelson.
In his will, Rockefeller also allowed each of his five surviving children to pick up to $1 million worth of art to keep as mementos essentially. Anything else they want will require an auction paddle.
Eileen Rockefeller says among her choices were a small yellow upholstered Minton chair from her childhood bedroom and a round Queen Anne table that her father kept in his library; her son Adam Growald chose a brass deer and unicorn pair from Nepal. David Jr.’s daughter Ariana Rockefeller says she chose an 18th-century porcelain dinner service because it reminded her of eating oatmeal breakfasts with her grandfather.
Dulany says she also chose some porcelain as well as some African figures and an enameled Korean chest. But the piece she truly craves is her father’s Diego Rivera from 1931, The Rivals. In a classic commingling of art and Rockefeller lore, the Mexican artist painted it for Dulany’s grandmother while traveling by boat with his artist wife, Frida Kahlo, to New York for his solo show at MoMA. Her grandmother later gave the large fiesta scene to her son David as a wedding gift, and it hung above the fireplace at his summer home in Maine.
When Christie’s experts were helping her father pick valuable pieces to slot into its high-profile evening sales, Dulany said they told him Rivera’s prices had ballooned lately. Christie’s estimates The Rivals could sell for at least $5 million. Had the art market not been as robust as it is, she says she likely would have asked to keep it. “It feels like a piece of him,” she says.
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