Their biggest purchases were in the mid-1980s, about the time that Eppler, whose family fled from Nazi Germany to the U.S. just before the Kristallnacht in 1938, sold Miller-Wohl for $270 million. In 1984 the couple bought an 8-foot-tall David Smith sculpture for $552,000; it’s estimated to sell for $5 million to $7 million.
Christie’s representatives are quick to point out that the Eppler collection is the first major abstract expressionist group since the auction of the David Pincus estate in 2012. Thirteen works from that trove tallied $175 million, with a Rothko surging to $86.9 million and a Pollock fetching $23 million.
The Eppler group may seem more modest—there’s no Rothko, for instance (the couple sold theirs before the financial crisis), and their Pollock has a top estimate of only $5.5 million. But as great abstract expressionist works become increasingly scarce with each passing year, auction houses are hungry for solid collections that have been tucked away for decades. Christie’s, which had to fight off Sotheby’s and Phillips to win the collection, offered the Eppler family members a guaranteed minimum price.
“It’s exciting to offer things that have never been sold at auction before or have been in the market before,” says Sara Friedlander, head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department in New York.
A deft Arshile Gorky drawing, Composition I (1943), purchased from the influential Allan Stone Gallery in 1984, is estimated at $2 million to $3 million and could set a record for work on paper by the artist.
The collection also “allows us to tell a new story about American abstraction,” Friedlander says. “It’s our job to bring to the market stellar examples by artists who may have been overlooked by the market in the past decade.”
William Baziotes, an American of Greek descent who died in 1963, could be one such person. His lush abstract canvas Phantasm is estimated at $600,000 to $800,000. The auction record of $385,000 for a Baziotes hasn’t been smashed since 1990.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.