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It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I am not a tax lawyer. But I do think that the late Elaine Wynn, who died in April at the age of 82, was very savvy in making the most effective use of the art in her estate. Judging from her obituaries, Wynn was happy to play a long game to advance her interests, whether that was the gambling empire she worked behind the scenes to build with Steve Wynn—whom she married and divorced twice—or her goal of building a major museum in Las Vegas in partnership with Michael Govan’s Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Now comes the news that her estate has donated Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which she bought for $142 million in 2013, to LACMA.

The triptych, which had been painstakingly reunited after being broken up among individual collectors, will become an anchor attraction at the museum. This fulfills Wynn’s philanthropic goals and commitments to Los Angeles and its future art-sharing alliance with a new institution in Las Vegas, but it also gives her estate a significant tax credit. When Wynn bought the triptych, it was the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. But even though Bacon’s estate continues to manage his reputation well, the artist’s market has settled into fairly steady price bands since his work first exploded in value in 2007. So the triptych would be unlikely to exceed its price of a dozen years ago if offered publicly now, and the donation will do more over the long term than another $100 million or so in cash might contribute to Wynn’s estate.

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Elaine was, by all accounts, the original collector among the Wynns, but her husband made art-buying a huge part of his personality—even building trophy art into his casino projects. You might remember, he bought 11 Picasso paintings to decorate a Picasso-themed restaurant in the Bellagio; Sotheby’s sold them in 2021 for $108 million, a solid success for the auction house and an indication of the interest in art as an event. Of course, not all of the art Steve Wynn collected in recent years has increased in value or been easy to sell. A noted buyer of trophy works, he owns hundreds of millions of dollars of paintings that were featured lots in marquee sales over the last decade. But there have also been reports that Wynn is stuck with trophy properties in Los Angeles and New York that have proved hard to move in today’s more cautious market.

Although Elaine wasn’t afraid to spend money for the art she really wanted, her collection is much more personal and idiosyncratic. Her estate is run by four co-executors including her two daughters, Kevyn and Gillian, as well as Andrew Pascal, the C.E.O. of Playstudios, and Bobby Kotick, the former C.E.O. of Activision Blizzard, a company Elaine invested in. They’re also showing good sense and foresight by allowing 20 works—all but one or two of her collection—to be sold in Christie’s evening and day sales with estimates that pay no heed to the prices Elaine originally paid.

The next rung down in Wynn’s collection features two very different works estimated at $12 million. The first is Sunflower V, a tall Joan Mitchell painting from her Sunflower series made in 1969, which Wynn bought at auction in 2005 for a smidge more than $1.5 million—six years after the previous owner bought it for one-sixth that price. In 2008, another painting in the series, Sunflower IV, sold for just below $2 million, or 16 times what it had sold for 15 years prior.

Then in 2018, Blueberry, also from 1969, sold at auction for almost $17 million, setting off another chain of strong Mitchell sales. A major retrospective that toured the U.S. and Europe after that helped drive prices up further. Another 1969 work called Noon, which sold in 2016 for nearly $9.8 million, sold again last May for $22.6 million—the artist’s third-highest price at auction. Sunflower V bears some similarities in composition, size, and orientation to these other works. “It’s a humdinger in person,” Christie’s Max Carter told me yesterday, breaking the adjective into two words for emphasis. “It’s electric.”

The other painting estimated at only $12 million is J.M.W. Turner’s Ehrenbreitstein, or the The Bright Stone of Honour and Tomb of Marceau from Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’, painted in 1835 by a favorite artist of Wynn’s daughter Gillian. Elaine Wynn gave the painting pride of place in her Beverly Hills dining room, having bought it in 2017 for just under $24 million, three years after Turner set his auction record at $47 million. Another Turner sold in 2022 at a price halfway between the two works, or $33.6 million. These kinds of price patterns suggest the Turner should still have buyers well above the estimate Christie’s and the estate have chosen.

A few other works are being offered with estimates at steep discounts from where Wynn bought the works or where the market trades. One is an Adrian Ghenie, according to the Journal, that was bought for $6.3 million in 2018 and is now estimated at $2.5 million. A Wayne Thiebaud landscape from 2000, River Stretch, is being offered at $3 million, even though a similar but wider work sold in 2021 for almost $10 million. And a Fernand Léger painting from 1921, Les Confidences, is estimated at $6 million, right where a smaller but similar work, also from 1921, sold last year.

We all know the overall auction market is way down. But that’s primarily in terms of market volume. For those who maintain that the current malaise is a function of a lack of supply and not limited demand or price inelasticity, the Wynn sale is going to offer ample evidence one way or another. If these low estimates bring many bidders hoping to capture a bargain, we may end up with selling prices at or above recent benchmarks of what Wynn paid. That will prove the supply-drought camp correct. If these works sell at prices near the estimates, we will know there has been a significant market reset. Either scenario will be a good step toward generating more sales in the future.