Christie’s will offer works from Agnes Gund’s collection at its November auctions in New York, with proceeds benefiting the Gund Art Foundation. Vija Celmins’s Untitled (Ocean) leads the selection, alongside works by Alexander Calder and Cy Twombly. The programme spans an evening auction, a day sale and online sales. Gund formerly led New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Auction house Christie’s will sell works from collector Agnes Gund’s collection in New York, in the United States, with proceeds benefiting the Gund Art Foundation. The programme includes the evening auction on 19 November, the post-war and contemporary art day sale on 20 November and online auctions. The selection brings together works made from the middle of the 1940s to the late 2010s.[1], [2]
Vija Celmins’s Untitled (Ocean), an oil painting from 1990, is among the evening highlights. Christie’s estimates its value at 6–8 million dollars. The selection also includes Alexander Calder’s 1963 mobile sculpture The Eye in the Black and an untitled Cy Twombly bronze from 1997. Works by Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Cindy Sherman also appear in the evening auction. The estimates are advance valuations rather than sale results.[1]
Gund served as president of New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1991 to 2002 and donated more than 800 works to its contemporary collection. In 1977 she founded Studio in a School, bringing professional artists into public school visual arts education. She also contributed 100 million dollars from the private sale of Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece in 2017 to establish the Art for Justice Fund, which works on mass incarceration and criminal justice reform.[1]
