UPDATE: Lehman Collection

Scott Reyburn of Bloomberg reports on the fall auctions that will be selling portions of the Lehman Brothers art collection.  Sotheby's NY, Freeman's in Philadelphia and Christie's London will both be involved in selling portions of the 1,000 lot collection.  Creditors of Lehman Brothers may see close to $16 million from the sale which includes work by Damien Hirst, Lucian Freud, Andreas Gursky and Gary Hume. The lots for these sales will be mixed in quality, with Christie's having 30% of its lots estimated under 1,000 pounds (approximately $1,560.00). Some minor lots have already been sold at earlier sales at Freemans with the sales performing better than expected. It will be interesting to see if the trend of continues.

Reyburn reports

About 250 further pieces from the Neuberger Berman and Lehman collections will come up for sale at Freeman’s in November. Freeman’s said that the lots are mostly contemporary works on paper produced during the last 10 years and are expected to raise between $250,000 and $350,000.

The Philadelphia auction house last year sold four groups of ex-Lehman artworks for a total of $2.2 million. More than 50 artists’ records were set and all of the lots were sold, said Freeman’s in an e-mailed statement.

Trophy Buys

“We had a lot of new buyers,” Anne Henry, the company’s vice-president of modern and contemporary art, said in an interview. “Some were bankers looking for trophies. Others were people who thought that if it was good enough for Lehman, then it was good enough for them to dip a toe into art collecting. Provenance had everything to do with it.”

Lehman’s creditors include Goldman Sachs Group Inc., UBS AG, the New York Giants and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority as well as individuals who hold Lehman bonds.

The bank has said it may spend five more years selling assets to pay unsecured creditors as little as 14.7 cents on the dollar.

To read the full article, click HERE.