Cindy and Jay Pritzker’s private art collection heads to Sotheby’s this fall
Thirty-seven artworks collected by well-known Chicago residents, Cindy and Jay Pritzker, including major examples by Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh, are slated to be auctioned Nov. 20 and 21 by Sotheby’s New York following a worldwide exhibition tour.
The 19th- and 20th-century paintings and sculptures, which have an estimated value of $120 million, will be among the highlights of the fall art-auction season, and they have already generated worldwide attention since the sale was announced Tuesday.
“What’s been interesting already is just seeing how much the name clearly resonates around the world with people who are drawn to the provenance and who have tremendous admiration for Jay and Cindy Pritzker and everything that the family has accomplished,” said Julian Dawes, vice chairman and head of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s New York.
The sale follows the March death of Cindy Pritzker at 101. She was the wife of Jay Pritzker, the founder of the Hyatt Hotel empire who died in 1999, and aunt of Gov. JB Pritzker. The family matriarch and her husband founded in 1979 the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which has become the Nobel Prize in the field, and they were major patrons of the arts and humanities.
As president of the Chicago Public Library Board and founding chair of the Library Foundation, Cindy Pritzker played a key role in the construction of the Harold Washington Library and was a driving force behind Chicago’s Millennium Park and the commissioning of Frank Gehry to design the Jay Priztker Pavilion.
In addition, she was a member of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Board of Trustees in 1984-88, and a family contribution during that time led to the naming of the Pritzker Galleries, where many of the museum’s Impressionist works are on view. “The Pritzker family have been great partners to the Art institute of Chicago for decades,” a museum spokeswoman said.
According to a Sotheby’s press spokesman, no one from the family was available for comment about the upcoming sale.
The 37 works date from the early 1870s through the 1960s, with Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, German Expressionism and abstraction all represented. “So, there is essentially a century of the greatest hits of art history, and each example is superb,” Dawes said.
Most of the works were collected in the 1980s and ’90s. “Decades and decades away from the public eye and off the market,” Dawes said. “Collected at a time when the market was very different and before a lot of these artists had evolved into the trophy-level status symbols they are today.”
The star offering is van Gogh’s “Romans Parisiens (Les Livres jaunes)” (1887), which is estimated to sell for about $40 million. The still life, which hung in the Pritzkers’ library above a fireplace, depicts a group of books strewn on a table alongside a single flower in a glass.
It is one of two paintings by the artist featuring this subject matter, with the other residing in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. “It’s certainly the highlight, I would say,” Dawes said, “in the sense that it is the most valuable by far, and, of course, van Gogh’s reputation and international prestige are in some ways in a league of his own.”
Other important works included the Pritzker auction are:
- “Léda et le cygne” (1944-46) by Henri Matisse; estimated sale price $7-10 million. This unusual triptych, which stands more than 6 feet tall, was an architectural commission for the Parisian home of an Argentine diplomat and his wife. Dawes described this unusual work as a “a painting and an object and a sculpture and an installation, all rolled up in one.”
- “La Maison de Pen du, gardeuse de vache” (1889) by Paul Gauguin; estimated sale price $6-8 million. Gauguin painted 22 landscapes in the Pont-Aven region of Brittany around 1889 and just four remain in private hands. “This painting has never been restored in any way, and it feels like it was painted yesterday,” Dawes said.
The Nov. 20 and 21 auctions will be among the first in Sotheby’s new location in the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art — a 1966 modernist Upper East Side landmark designed by Marcel Breuer. The Pritzker works will be on view there in a pre-sale exhibition from Nov. 8 through 20 following a global tour that begins Sept. 22 in Hong Kong.
Additional works from the Pritzker collection, such as a 16th-century tapestry and Chinese Tang Dynasty pottery horse, will be sold in other Sotheby’s sales that run through the spring.