On Sunday, hundreds of works from the art collection of failed banking giant Lehman Brothers will go on the auction block at Freeman's auction house in Philadelphia.
The 200-plus pieces of modern and contemporary art up for bid once lined the corridors and graced the board rooms of Lehman's offices in New York, Boston and Wilmington, Del. Highlights of Sunday's sale include prints by Claes Oldenburg, David Hockney, Robert Indiana, Frank Stella and Roy Lichtenstein.
Anne Henry, vice president of the 204-year-old auction house, valued the collection at $500,000 to $750,000. There is no reserve price on most of the art, save for about a dozen pieces estimated at $10,000 and up.
"Our phones have been ringing off the hook," she said. "The pieces are interesting, in great condition and appeal to all kinds of collectors."
The group is largely comprised of American artists from the 1930s to the present. Some pieces were purchased mere months before Lehman's spectacular collapse in September 2008 under $600 billion of debt, the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history and the harbinger of the worst U.S. financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Now, everything must go.
The Philadelphia auctioneers will hold two more sales from the Lehman collection: paintings and sculpture on Dec. 6th and a no-reserve auction of 450 more prints on Feb. 12.
"Freeman's is giving us national exposure for our better works as well as the moderate items that would be overlooked by larger houses," said Kimberly Macleod, spokeswoman for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
The auction does not include any of the personal collection of Richard Fuld, Lehman's vilified former chief executive and (formerly) avid art collector. A year ago, 16 works owned by Fuld and his wife were auctioned by Christie's for $13.5 million, far below the $20 million estimate.
The market for postwar contemporary art has fallen precipitously, along with the fortunes of high-end art collectors, since the world economic free fall. But Henry believes that applies more to the big-ticket art market.
