After the solid sales in New York last November, the market has been hoping that more collections like Leonard Lauder’s would appear for this May’s auctions. Now it’s getting a little of what it wanted—but at a price. Last Friday, Christie’s announced it would sell $123 million worth of Agnes Gund’s art this May, a far cry from the nearly $530 million that the Lauder collection achieved.

Presumably, the Lauder family was eager to vend Leonard’s art to avoid having to sell their depressed Estée Lauder stock holdings: By the time they made that decision, in the summer of 2025, the company’s stock had fallen 84 percent from its late-2022 highs. Gund’s estate does not seem to be under similar pressure to sell all of her art. We’re just seeing three pieces—though two are very high-value works—and the estimates are, well, robust. A collector with as much important art as Gund, who died in September at 87, always keeps a few sentimental, but significant, pieces. Sensing the market’s moment, Gund’s estate has decided to sell some, but not all, of them this spring. The most valuable of the three works coming to auction is Mark Rothko’s No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), from 1964, which will have an $80 million estimate. If it sells there, the buyer will pay a price with fees above the current record, which was set more than a decade ago at just under $87 million for a Rothko. On the other end of the spectrum, Gund’s estate has offered a Joseph Cornell collaged box, Untitled (Medici Princess), from 1948, with a $3 million estimate. That seems quite cheap against the Rothko, and even other Medici Princess boxes, like one that sold for just under $6 million in 2014. Two works titled Medici Slot Machine were sold for $5 million and $7.8 million in the same era. Does that mean Christie’s estimate is low? Probably not. Not many high-value Cornells have sold in some time. Also in the sale will be a Cy Twombly untitled “Roma” painting, from 1961, offered with an estimate of $40 million. Except the painting, according to a European Twombly-phile I was chatting with on WhatsApp last Friday, is smaller than the images suggest. It was also curiously dangled at an art fair in recent years—not for sale, of course, but not not for sale forever. Big-name collectors, like the British Reuben brothers, have bought similar works for less, like this one from the Macklowe collection that made $21 million. And the auction high-water mark for a Twombly from this era of his oeuvre is the $52 million paid in 2017 for an incredibly well-preserved Leda and the Swan, from 1962, that had been stored in a crate for decades. Alas, that was at the tail end of Twombly’s market peak. My guide through the Twombly market told me that if Gund’s Roma painting made the $40 million low estimate, “it will be a very good sign for the market.”

I could not help but notice that the story in The New York Times announcing the Twombly consignment contained a quote from an art advisor describing Gund as “truly an ideal collector.” I’m still wondering about that description. Aggie Gund, a banking heiress who served as a president of MoMA and a longtime member of the board, gave a lot of her art to institutions like that one and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She also sold art to support causes she thought worthy, including Roy Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece, from 1962, which Steven Cohen bought from her for $165 million.

But what made Gund’s collecting ideal? According to the advisor, her role as a philanthropist and her deep web of relationships made her collection a desirable destination for artists and their dealers alike. He was describing the art world’s penchant for status: If you sell your artist’s work to a collector known for donating to top-flight institutions like the Cleveland Museum of Art or MoMA, there’s a good chance the artist’s reputation will benefit in the long run. The art world calls that provenance. But it’s really just the hope that if Gund had a personal relationship with giants like Rothko, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, and Johns, and also liked your artist’s work enough to buy it, your artist might be a giant someday, too. The implication is that dealers recognized the validating power of Gund’s ownership and sought her out. After all, she also served on the boards of the Frick, the Barnes, the Morgan Library, the Warhol foundation, and the Rauschenberg foundation. I was curious to see what being an “ideal collector” might actually mean in practice. Christie’s press release tells us that Gund donated more than 1,000 works from her personal collection to MoMA, and 800 additional works to other museums—though photographs of Gund in her home taken over the years suggest there’s plenty of good work by Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Johns, and Rothko still in the estate’s possession. The Johns show at Gagosian right now features a Gund gift borrowed from MoMa, titled Between the Clock and Bed, among its star trio of works. MoMa’s website lists dozens more works that Gund helped the museum acquire, including postwar stalwarts like Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, James Rosenquist, Ellsworth Kelly, Hans Hoffmann, Robert Smithson, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Alice Neel, Lynda Benglis, Robert Gober, and many others. Cleveland’s website reveals donations of prominent names like Richard Serra, Brice Marden, Philip Guston, and Claes Oldenburg. As impressive as that list is, in some ways it is expected that a rich patron reaching her maturity in the 1960s would have collected and befriended most of those artists. But her donations to Cleveland and MoMA also show her conviction, taste, and foresight. They include major African American and African-diaspora artists like Julie Mehretu, Jacob Lawrence, David Hammons, Martin Puryear, Rashid Johnson, Sanford Biggers, Ouattara Watts, Kara Walker, and a Gee’s Bend quilt. Alongside these giants, though, there are donations of works by artists whose names are not so familiar, like Ursula von Rydingsvard or Jim Hodges. The one gift I found charming and telling was the Jacob Kassay electroplated silver canvas that Gund had donated to the Cleveland Museum in 2024 in partnership with the artist. Some of you will remember that Kassay was a brief sensation in the art market from 2011 to 2014, when his process-oriented, formalist works were selling at auction in the $200,00 to $300,000 range. By 2016, his auction prices had fallen to mid-to-low five figures, and he seemed like a case study in the evanescence of art-market success. I’m sure there were many collectors who got caught up in the Kassay mania and then donated their works to recoup some tax advantage or simply remove an awkward reminder from their collections. But Gund wasn’t one of them. Cleveland’s Kassay was made in 2018, long after the artist’s star had burned out in the market’s imagination, and Gund acquired and donated it only six years later. That’s an intentional act that cuts against the prevailing wisdom and, one can only assume, expresses some personal conviction about the artist’s work. It cannot have been hard to get a Kassay in 2024, but there was Gund donating one. And that, I think, is the best reason she’s being described as the ideal collector.

Regular readers of Wall Power will remember that when I was in Scotland, in October, I was lucky enough to be there during the final weeks of the National Galleries’ Andy Goldsworthy | Fifty Years show. Except for having spent time up the Hudson in Mountainville, New York, where Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall is sited, I had never been able to spend an extended amount of time with his work.

Last week, The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead had a lengthy profile of Goldsworthy that emphasized his long residency in Scotland; his relationship with the Duke of Buccleuch, one of the largest landowners in the country; and the extensive project he’s been working on called Gravestones. The project involves gathering stones that have been removed in the process of digging churchyard graves and depositing them in an enclosure on a hilltop in Scotland not so far from the border with England. Mead quoted David West, whose job is to oversee a number of graveyards in the county where Goldsworthy is gathering his stones. West remarked that he had not really thought about art in any way until Goldsworthy made a presentation to him and his colleagues explaining the project. “I never, ever thought I would be interested in that,” he told West. “And then Andy came along.” Let that be the final note for today. I’ll see you tomorrow in the Inner Circle. M