Barron's, as well as the NY Times and Wall Street Journal are all reporting on the sale of former PaineWebber CEO nearly $400 million art collection. What is unique is the important collection is not being sold through Sotheby's, Christie's of Phillips, but through three major galleries. The galleries are Acquavella, Gagosian and Pace.
It will be interesting to follow the sales, if made public and if this is a one off unique sale, or if it becomes a trend. Concerns for both appraisers and collectors is the lack of transparency in sales reporting.
Barrons reports
Source: BarronsAround three weeks ago, Marc Glimcher, president and CEO at Pace Gallery, called on his peers—and chief competitors—at Gagosian and Acquavella Galleries with the far-out idea of coming together to handle the sale of former PaineWebber CEO Donald B. Marron’s renowned art collection.
Shortly afterward Glimcher and his father, Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher, along with Bill Acquavella, Larry Gagosian, and Gagosian’s chief operating officer, Andrew Fabricant —all of whom had known and worked closely with Marron on his collection for decades—sat down with the family and their attorneys with their pitch, according to Fabricant.
“We extolled the fact you have enormous institutional memory and authority with these three galleries and you [the family] know them well,” Fabricant says. This is a group who had “lasting and meaningful” relationships with Marron, and “who actually care, because they cared about him personally.”
On Wednesday, the three global powerhouse dealers announced they had won the deal to handle the sale of the Donald B. Marron Family Collection, calling it an “unprecedented move.” Their win means Marron’s masterworks-studded collection won’t be offered publicly via one of the three major auction houses—Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s—which reportedly had all vied for the collection.
Representatives from the auction houses either offered no comment on the galleries’ announcement, or declined to respond.
As Marc Glimcher pointed out in a news release on Wednesday, the gallery-led project will “celebrate the lifelong relationships that can develop between collectors and dealers, and the role our galleries have played in supporting Marron’s vision.”
The news shocked many in the art world who had expected one of the auction houses would win the consignment.
“It will upset the apple cart enormously for Christie’s and Sotheby’s,” says Philip Hoffman, CEO at The Fine Art Group, an art advisory firm in London. The houses were probably “95% sure it would go to one of them.”
But Pace, Gagosian, and Acquavella all have “good placing power,” Hoffman says. “Each has been in the business for 30 or 40 years. There have been changes in the auction house teams in the last two years, and obviously the [Marron family] trustees decided they wanted to work with continuity.”
Marron, who died unexpectedly in December at age 85, was a renowned financier and art collector, who began buying art about 60 years ago for PaineWebber, a brokerage firm that was sold and folded into the Swiss banking giant UBS AG—along with the firm’s art collection—in the fall of 2000.
But Marron, who joined the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1975, serving as president from 1985-91, also collected on his own, starting with the Hudson River School painters and later moving to the Abstract Expressionists and beyond, according to the news release. The Marron Family Collection includes major works by Pablo Piccaso, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning, and Gerhard Richter, among many other stars of the art world, the galleries said.
A total dollar figure for the collection has not been released, although it’s estimated by various news outlets to be in the range of $400 million.
Unlike many collectors who walked through the gallery’s doors, Acquavella remembers Marron as far back as the 1970s, just coming in to “see what you had.” Then, he says, Marron “wanted to know everything about it.”
The first deal Acquavella says he made with the gallery was the sale of a Robert Rauschenberg Combine, a series by the artist that combined painting and sculpture. Then he bought works by Modern masters, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Paul Klee, Acquavella says.
“He loved to be involved in the art world from the very beginning,” he says.
Fabricant says he saw Marron every Saturday for the last 20 years. “He was really inquisitive, extremely tall, and demanded multiple cups of very strong tea,” Fabricant says. (Marron was 6-foot-6-inches tall.)
“He was extremely punctual—first off Saturday morning he’d be in my office,” Fabricant adds. “He loved talking about the shifting sands of the art world, what was developing and what wasn’t. He really loved the information exchange.”
Despite the fact all the gallery owners know each other and are friendly, they are huge rivals. But they came together out of “opportunity and necessity,” Fabricant says. To get them all together “on one page with one common goal—it happened, but it’s unprecedented.”
Having a consortium of three galleries banding together to compete against the deep pockets of the auction houses is unusual, a creative and “brilliant strategy,” says Naomi Baigell, managing director at Athena Art Finance, a unit of the online alternative assets platform, YieldStreet.
But these and other major galleries have been expanding their global footprints for years, and are often competing with the auction houses—which also do private sales—for consignments.
“As much as it’s been a shock, it’s been a long time coming,” says Baigell, who previously was director of corporate art services at Sotheby’s. “It’s a new paradigm now. It opens up the bridge of competition for these estates.”
In the case of the Marron collection, this arrangement makes particular sense because the artworks for sale are pieces “these galleries feel passionate about and know as well as the auction houses," she says.
There is some precedent for galleries to take the lead on a major consignment. In 2008, art dealer Ileana Sonnabend’s heirs reportedly consigned about $600 million worth of art in two transactions, one to a group of dealers in New York and Paris, and a second group to Gagosian, the publication ArtForum reported at the time.
The Marron family collection will be displayed at Pace and Gagosian in May, although the exact configuration of the exhibitions isn’t completely decided yet, Acquavella says. The galleries would like to be able to show the historical span of Marron’s collecting, but that “will be hard to do because it goes back so many years,” Acquavella says. The plan is to borrow pieces that have been given over the years to museums and other institutions, if they can.
The galleries also will be issuing a scholarly book about Marron's life and his collecting, that will accompany the exhibition. The volume, to be produced by Phaidon Press, “will explain what a great collector he really was, what a passionate collector he was,” he says.
That, Fabricant points out, will be quite different than an auction catalog that “ends up on a recycling heap,” the day after a public sale.
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