Dealer Estates Will Once Again Headline New York’s May Marquee Auctions
The generational transfer reshaping the art world is playing out not only at the level of the collector but across an entire cohort of dealers gradually exiting the scene, with their legacy planning and estate strategies increasingly determining which top-tier consignments and artists come to market. Last year’s spring marquee sales featured an $18.5 million selection from the collection of legendary dealer Barbara Gladstone and a $40.4 million trove from dealer Daniella Luxembourg. This May, the dealer collection saga continues with the more than $130 million Robert E. Mnuchin collection leading Sotheby's evening sales, while the personal collection of trailblazing gallerist Marian Goodman will headline Christie's Spring Marquee Week. The announcement of the consignment follows the legendary dealer’s passing in January.
“She was a giant at five-foot-two,” Amy Goodman said in a statement remembering her mother. “She had an incredible, deep love and reverence for what humanity has created, the very best of it.” Described by the New York Times as “art’s quiet matriarch,” Goodman built a rigorously global program over the decades, her gallery’s international reputation growing in tandem with the institutional recognition of the artists she represented.
She was among the first to recognize that conceptual art, performance, minimalism and post-minimal practices could not be sustained solely through traditional market mechanisms. Instead, they required a long-term view, guided by deep trust and a vision that privileged longevity over quick turnover. “One must be willing to keep showing an artist for fifteen or twenty years,” she once said in a rare interview with art critic Peter Schjeldahl for the New Yorker in 2004. Her relationship with artists was both deeply personal and grounded in active support, resulting—as so often happens for a gallerist—in a personal collection built through helping produce, showcase and fund their careers.
Leading the trove is a group of museum-grade works by Gerhard Richter, one of today’s global stars whom she championed early, which will be offered in a standalone single-owner segment at the start of Marian’s Richters & 21st Century Evening Sale on May 20. The top lot is an early, photorealistic work from 1982, Kerze (Candle) (estimate: $35-50 million), featuring a lone candle with a flame seemingly emanating from within the canvas itself—a contemporary vanitas and meditation on temporality and transience, further underscored by Richter’s signature blurring.
Christie’s will also auction three superb works from his most sought-after Abstraktes Bild series, all dated to the mid-to-late 1990s, when he reached new heights in his abstract articulation of tone and the dynamic fragmentation of any sense of stability in a final image. Leading the group is the highly anticipated Mohn, a 1995 work that debuted in the artist’s landmark exhibition “Gerhard Richter: 100 Bilder at the Carré d’Art” in Nîmes in the summer of 1996, before traveling to Goodman’s own gallery that fall and remaining in her private collection ever since. Also offered in this first session is 18. June 2009, an oil on chromogenic print—an overpainted photograph of Goodman and the artist in an exhibition space. (Estimates range from $30,000 to $50,000 on the low end and from $35 million to $50 million on the high end.)
Through frequent travel, Goodman developed close relationships with a new generation of German artists early, including Richter, whom she was the first to present and sell in New York. She hosted more than a dozen solo exhibitions of the artist’s work, representing him from 1985 through 2020, before he moved to David Zwirner in late 2022. Goodman’s works come to auction just as Richter is experiencing renewed market momentum, with recent record auction results and strong fair sales following the extensive survey staged by Fondation Louis Vuitton during Art Basel Paris, where Hauser & Wirth made headlines selling a $23 million work by the artist during the VIP preview.
Three paintings by Richter were also among the top lots in London and Hong Kong this past March: Schober (Haybarn) from 1984, one of the artist’s largest landscape photo-paintings, sold for £6.9 million on March 5 at Christie’s London, followed in the same sale by a £7.6 million red Abstraktes Bild. Later that month, a 1991 red canvas Abstraktes Bild led Christie’s sale in Hong Kong, achieving HK$92.1 million ($11.8 million) with fees against a HK$78-98 million estimate. Richter’s current auction record stands at $46.35 million, set in 2015 by a 1986 Abstraktes Bild at Sotheby’s London, which at the time also established the highest price ever achieved for a living European artist. According to the Artnet database, the artist’s total auction sales reached $68 million in 2025—nearly 62 percent higher than in 2024—while the average sale price rose more than 55 percent year over year to $204,154.
Additional lots from Goodman’s collection will be presented across two further auctions: a dedicated single-owner sequence opening the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale and a dedicated online sale, Breaking Ground: The Private Collection of Marian Goodman. Notably, as part of an agreement with the gallery’s partners and Goodman’s estate, none of the works included in these sales are by artists currently represented on the gallery’s roster.
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