[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/c-s-comp.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\tAs summer turns to fall, the November auctions in New York are just over the horizon. And while much of the art world might be signing off for the next few weeks, the rainmakers at Christie\u2019s and Sotheby\u2019s are fighting over consignments, including what remains of the art collection of Herbert Lust. Prior to his death this past May at 99 years old, he had already donated hundreds of works to multiple museums. But, there is apparently plenty still left to fight over. Lust\u2019s estate is currently shopping roughly 300 pieces, collectively valued in the range of $60 million, sources familiar with the negotiations tell\u00a0ARTnews<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tThe majority of the Lust works are modestly scaled with low values, likely to be sold during day sales, but around 10 are considered major works, the top lot almost certainly a large sculpture by Alberto Giacometti. Also in the mix will be works by Robert Indiana, Mary Bauermeister, Frank Stella, and Hans Bellmer. Lust is likely the largest collector of Bellmer\u2019s work, quipping at one point\u00a0he could buy 50 great Bellmers<\/strong>\u00a0for the price of one great Magritte. \u201cI have more Bellmers than the top four museums put together,\u201d he once said.<\/p>\n \n\tBoth auction houses declined to comment on whether they were pursuing the sale. \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAn investment banker and famously eccentric collector, Lust was a fixture of the postwar art world on both sides of the Atlantic. Over the better part of a century, he amassed thousands of works, including deep holdings of Giacometti, Indiana, and Alexander Calder. His collection was less the product of some grand strategy than an extraordinarily long social life, a curious eye, and a healthy dose of pragmatism: also included in the offerings<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s possible that Sotheby\u2019s has a leg up in this fight. The auction house has spent years cultivating Lust and his collection. In 2017, it\u00a0offered 27 works<\/strong>\u00a0by Indiana from his holdings. Two years later, Sotheby\u2019s sent a camera crew to Lust\u2019s home in Greenwich, Connecticut, where the collector, then 93,\u00a0happily held court<\/strong>\u00a0amid an mind-boggling quantity of art, across a range of movements and styles: Stellas and Bellmers hanging on the walls, Calder mobiles suspended from the ceiling, Giacomettis seemingly everywhere.<\/p>\n \n\tOne trophy lot in the sale will likely be an edition of Giacometti\u2019s\u00a0Figure, demie grandeur<\/em>, which seemingly appears to be shown installed in Lust\u2019s home about four minutes into the Sotheby\u2019s documentary. According to the\u00a0Giacometti Foundation website<\/strong>, these sculptures were made in an edition of six in 1964 and stand about 45 inches tall. Lust, who met Giacometti after arriving in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship in 1949, initially found the artist\u2019s attenuated figures awful. Then Lust read Sartre. \u201cIf Sartre and people like that said he was the greatest living artist,\u201d Lust later recalled, \u201cthere was something wrong with me.\u201d\u00a0He reconsidered, and started on his journey to build up a massive store of Giacometti\u2019s work.<\/p>\n \n\tGiacometti would hold a special place in Lust\u2019s collecting heart for the rest of his life. In a\u00a02003 interview<\/strong>, he said that if he were marooned on a desert island and allowed one work of art, he would choose Giacometti\u2019s\u00a0Standing Woman<\/em>, though it\u2019s unclear if he owned that one at the time of his death. A 2020\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0profile mentions an important early Giacometti bronze of a woman, which Lust, who paid $89,000 for it in installments, described as his \u201cmost prized possession,\u201d though the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t give a title or date. \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe Sotheby\u2019s film, however, does give us a glimpse into the depth of Lust\u2019s holdings, when the camera pans over\u00a0Figure, demie grandeur<\/em>, \u201cthe only nude [Giacometti made] that has a real face,\u201d as Lust put it. Given that characterization, Giacometti-heads will likely fork over serious dough for this work, especially given its provenance. The closest comp, by size, is the artist\u2019s 46-inch\u00a0Femme de Venise III\u00a0<\/em>(1958, edition 5 of 6), which sold for a hair over $25 million at Christie\u2019s New York in 2022.<\/p>\n \n\tStill, any of Giacometti\u2019s standing women could bring in top dollar, as these sculptures occupy some of the priciest territory in both the artist\u2019s oeuvre and modern sculpture more broadly.\u00a0Standing just over five feet tall,\u00a0Femme Leoni<\/em>\u00a0(conceived in 1947, cast 1960) sold for $28.4 million at Sotheby\u2019s New York in 2023 against a $25 million to $35 million estimate (including buyer\u2019s premium).\u00a0At the other end of the scale are the roughly nine-foot\u00a0Grandes femmes debout<\/em>\u00a0Giacometti, the largest sculptures he ever made for an unrealized 1960 commission at Chase Manhattan Plaza. A 1961 cast of\u00a0Grande femme debout II<\/em>\u00a0sold for $27.5 million at Christie\u2019s in 2008, according to ARTDAI. And let\u2019s not forget that Giacometti still holds the title when it comes to most expensive sculpture to ever sell at auction:\u00a0L\u2019Homme au doigt,\u00a0<\/em>a 1947 bronze, sold for more than $141 million at Christie\u2019s in 2015.<\/p>\n \n\tBut Lust\u2019s Giacomettis represent the tip of the iceberg of this obsessive collector.<\/p>\n \n\tBy the time of the Sotheby\u2019s and\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>interviews, Lust had already thinned out his holdings via several high-profile museum donations, though he still had over 1,000 objects on hand in Greenwich and his Manhattan pied-\u00e0-terre. The largest beneficiary of his largesse, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, has over the decades received a 1961 Indiana, three Man Rays, five Bellmers, and 200 Giacomettis.<\/p>\n \n\tThen there is the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., whose namesake, Joseph Hirshhorn, had been Lust\u2019s neighbor and friend. Shortly before his death in 1981, Hirshhorn asked Lust to donate to the fledgling institution, to which Lust agreed. Lust good on the promise in 2020, giving the museum\u00a0more than 70 photographs<\/strong>, including works by Berenice Abbott, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eug\u00e8ne Atget, Aaron Siskind and Eadweard Muybridge, as well as Herbert Matter\u2019s images of Giacometti and his studio. At the time, Lust said he intended to give the museum the lion\u2019s share of his roughly 400 photographs in another round, though that gift has not been publicly announced, if it\u2019s still in the works. (The museum didn\u2019t immediately answer a request for comment.)<\/p>\n \n\tNone of these dispersals seem to have slowed Lust down much. In 2020, he was still making the rounds of New York galleries, his home still somewhere between a private museum and an overstuffed storeroom. The year prior, Sotheby\u2019s had gone as far as saying the collection was still \u201cone of the greatest of [Lust\u2019s] generation.\u201d\u00a0Lust himself was considerably less grand about it. \u201cI never thought it would become worth [so much],\u201d he told Sotheby\u2019s. \u201cI chalk it up to one word: love. Always buy what you love.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/christies-sothebys-battle-herbert-lust-collection-1234795281\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/c-s-comp.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. As summer turns to fall, the November auctions in New York are just over the horizon. And while much of the art world might be signing off for the next few weeks, […]<\/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-2101494","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\/2101494","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=2101494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2101494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2101494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2101494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}