[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/SOTHEBYS2025_1118_065348-6367_ALIVE.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong>\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0<\/em>the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here<\/em>\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday.<\/em><\/p>\n \n\tPaul Allen, S.I. Newhouse, Robert Mnuchin, Marian Goodman, Leonard Lauder, Barbara Gladstone: the list of collectors whose art has arrived at auction over the past two years reads like the society pages of decades past. Some died; others have merely reached an age when keeping several hundred million dollars\u2019 worth of paintings around no longer seems quite as important as it once did.<\/p>\n \n\tThis generation of collectors has become critical to the art market recovery\u2014at least the one experienced by the major auction houses. The first six months of this year\u00a0were the strongest\u00a0<\/strong>for the major houses in years, with Christie\u2019s reporting $4.5 billion in sales and Sotheby\u2019s reporting $4.4 billion. That\u2019s the strongest result in five years for Christie\u2019s, and a record for Sotheby\u2019s. But those totals, analysts have noted, were fueled more by extraordinary collections than by a return to the frothy post-Covid period.<\/p>\n Mari-Claudia Jim\u00e9nez<\/strong>, a partner and head of Withers Art and Advisory and a former Sotheby\u2019s executive, put a sharper point on it. \u201cThere is no question that the recovery of the market at this moment is entirely being driven by these collections,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n \n\tWhy? Because the art market has a perpetual supply problem.<\/p>\n \n\tGreat works have a habit of disappearing. They enter museums, where they may never be sold again, or the collections of wealthy people who may hold them for decades. \u201cIt\u2019s very rare to find masterpieces anymore,\u201d Jim\u00e9nez said. Estates are the moment when \u201ca plethora of fresh masterpiece trophy-level material\u201d suddenly reappears.<\/p>\n \n\tThis is especially important because the art market \u201ccorrection\u201d from 2023 through 2025 was concentrated at the top. In 2024,\u00a0Clare McAndrew<\/strong>, author of the\u00a0Art Basel & UBS Global Collecting Survey<\/em>, told me that there weren\u2019t necessarily fewer people willing to spend enormous sums on art; there simply weren\u2019t as many enormously valuable things being offered to them.<\/p>\n \n\tDeath has started to solve that problem, and it isn\u2019t likely a one-off coincidence. We are in the early stages of the so-called Great Wealth Transfer, in which tens of trillions of dollars in assets will pass from the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers to their Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z heirs.<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to the\u00a0Deloitte Private and ArtTactic Art & Finance Report<\/em>,\u00a0close to $1 trillion worth of art\u00a0<\/strong>could transfer in the next decade. Some heirs will want the pictures, but plenty will want the money instead.<\/p>\n \n\tThere is a nice bit of evidence for this in\u00a0ARTnews<\/em>\u2018s own archive: in 2020, we\u00a0published a story<\/strong>\u00a0titled \u201cEstates in Waiting: Which Collectors Are Being Courted by Auction Houses and Museums?\u201d Among the collections on the watch list were Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder and Paul Allen. Allen\u2019s collection would eventually become\u00a0the first single-owner sale<\/strong>\u00a0to break $1 billion. Works from\u00a0Leonard Lauder\u2019s collection<\/strong>\u00a0helped power Sotheby\u2019s sales last fall with results nearly as good.<\/p>\n \n\tThe heirs are only half the story. Jim\u00e9nez pointed to collectors like Pauline Karpidas and Joe Lewis, who have sold major collections while still alive. \u201cIt\u2019s the combination\u201d of those two types of people that is seeding the market with fresh material, she said. \u201cThe people who have passed and the people who are sort of at the end of their collecting journey.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThen there is the even less romantic reason: taxes.<\/p>\n \n\tEstate sales often come with financial obligations and deadlines that ordinary consignments do not, which can make certainty particularly valuable.\u00a0Mitchell Zuckerman<\/strong>, a cofounder of Art Market Advisors and a former Sotheby\u2019s executive, told me that executors and beneficiaries frequently choose guarantees.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cVery often, beneficiaries and executors from estates need to pay estate tax and they don\u2019t want to take the risk of the thing not selling,\u201d Zuckerman said. \u201cAnd they\u2019re prepared to pay the contingent costs of the guarantee. But many, many entire estates are guaranteed.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThat combination helps explain why estates are nearly perfect auction-house clients. An executor may have a deadline and dozens or hundreds of objects to dispose of. A good gallery can sell a Richter painting, but an auction house can sell the Richter, the furniture, the jewelry, the design, and whatever else is in the house, put dates on the calendar, and guarantee a minimum return. \u201cIt\u2019s turnkey,\u201d Zuckerman said.<\/p>\n \n\tNo wonder Christie\u2019s and Sotheby\u2019s fight so hard for them.<\/p>\n \n\tThe competition begins long before the auction. Sometimes families plan years ahead; sometimes a collection is in play only months before a sale, according to\u00a0Madeline Lissner<\/strong>, executive vice president for Sotheby\u2019s global fine art division. The houses pitch estimates, guarantees, marketing plans, and the global machinery required to turn somebody\u2019s possessions into an event.<\/p>\n \n\tThat machinery has also expanded to match the way great collectors actually collect. Major collections rarely fit neatly into a single auction category. The same person who owns a $50 million painting may also have furniture, jewelry, design, watches, coins, or objects worth a fraction of that amount. Lissner said that breadth has become part of the pitch: rather than forcing an estate to find separate sellers for different parts of a collection, a global auction house can handle nearly all of it.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cA lot of the collectors that we find, they\u2019re not single-category collectors and they\u2019re also not single-price-point collectors,\u201d Lissner said. \u201cThey just as easily may own a $50 million painting as they\u2019ll have a variety of items that will be $10,000 or $20,000.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSelling everything under one roof also gives the houses something else to work with: the collector\u2019s story. A collection can be marketed across paintings, design, jewelry, and collectibles as the product of a single taste, creating what Lissner called a \u201chalo effect\u201d around the entire estate.<\/p>\n \n\tFor an estate, the financial terms carry particular weight. An executor has fiduciary obligations to beneficiaries and cannot necessarily turn down a materially better offer simply because he prefers the specialist across town. \u201cYou have to maximize value,\u201d Jim\u00e9nez said.<\/p>\n \n\tBut money isn\u2019t everything. Zuckerman breaks a pitch down into three broad components: the financial terms, the marketing, and the people in the room. Personal chemistry can swing a consignment even when another proposal is better on paper, because the specialists making the pitch will soon be making essentially the same pitch to prospective buyers.<\/p>\n \n\tJim\u00e9nez put it more bluntly: \u201cThe deal is only as good as the people who are selling your artworks.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThere is another commodity being sold, too: immortality.<\/p>\n \n\tFor heirs, an estate sale can be the final public monument to a parent or grandparent. The catalogues, exhibitions, videos, and press campaigns transform the collector into a character: a person of taste, discernment, and vision. Jim\u00e9nez said that storytelling can matter enormously to families because it creates a legacy that will remain searchable long after the collection has scattered. Sotheby\u2019s sees a similar advantage in extending the story of a collector across categories, from paintings to design and collectibles.<\/p>\n \n\tWhether every collector deserves such hagiography is another question. The provenance of Newhouse or Allen can genuinely add something to a work. The provenance of an otherwise unknown plutocrat probably does not. Auction houses, naturally, are paid to suggest otherwise.<\/p>\n \n\tBut the underlying supply is real, and it is unlikely to disappear soon.<\/p>\n \n\tTen years ago, buyers under 40 represented less than 10 percent of Sotheby\u2019s buyers, according to Lissner. Today they account for about 20 percent. The interesting question, then, is not whether the current generation of great collectors will die. Zuckerman, who has been in the auction business since the 1970s, offered the least sentimental answer to that: \u201cThere\u2019s an unending supply of art-owning estates.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe question is whether the next generation is interested in buying what\u2019s\u00a0for sale.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/great-estate-rush-that-is-reshaping-art-market-1234794331\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/SOTHEBYS2025_1118_065348-6367_ALIVE.jpg?w=1024″] Editor\u2019s Note:\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday. Paul Allen, S.I. Newhouse, Robert Mnuchin, Marian Goodman, Leonard Lauder, Barbara Gladstone: the list of collectors whose art has arrived at auction over the past two years reads like the society pages […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2079643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2079643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2079643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2079643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2079643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2079643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2079643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}