Every November, the auction houses stage a sort of competitive memorial service, in which the art collections of the recently departed are given handsome catalogues, evocative titles and nine-figure estimates. This year’s slate is, by any measure, an embarrassment of estates. And one of the most quietly revealing entries is the collection of Theodore and Ruth Baum, which Sotheby’s announced on Oct. 8 under the title “Vision,” with an overall estimate in excess of $100 million.
The collectors
Ted Baum, as ARTnews’s Brian Boucher reports, was a cable television magnate; Ruth Baum was an interior designer. They kept homes in New York, New Jersey, Southampton and Palm Beach. Ted died in 2021 and Ruth this year. A gallery at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach bears their name, and they funded that museum’s first contemporary art curator position, per ARTnews. They also served on boards and committees at the Guggenheim and the Parrish Art Museum.
Their collecting origin story is the kind Sotheby’s specialists dream about. It began, ARTnews recounts, with a John Sloan sketch Ruth bought at a charity auction in the 1970s, then moved through modern works on paper by Léger and Picasso, until, in 1983, the couple bought the painting they hoped would be their “one great painting”: an untitled 1967 Rothko in red and orange, acrylic on paper. It was their first contemporary purchase. “The Rothko hit us,” Ruth said, in a remark quoted in the house’s press materials. “That was it. We were children of the ’60s, and the art of that period spoke to us.”
The pictures
That Rothko now leads the sale at $10 million to $15 million, according to ARTnews, sharing top billing with Ed Ruscha’s Dimple (1964), the painting in which a C-clamp appears to pinch the “e” at the end of the word, a pun that ARTnews says appealed to Ted’s love of wordplay. Joan Mitchell’s Green Book of Barbara Guest (1960) is estimated in the region of $12 million. A Burri, a Fontana and Warhol’s The Scream (After Edvard Munch) (1984) are each tagged at $4 million to $6 million. The collection runs to more than 130 works in total, including names like Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni and David Hammons. Two dozen works go to a dedicated evening sale on Nov. 16, with a day sale on Nov. 17 and more to follow in sales next year.
ARTnews offers two delicious details about provenance. The Warhol was bought at Sotheby’s London in 2006 for £1.5 million, and the Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese (1960), at Sotheby’s London in 2000 for £333,500. A work bought for around a third of a million pounds now carries a $4 million-plus estimate. The Baums, in other words, were not just collectors but, inadvertently, extremely good investors, which is the most reliable way to be remembered fondly by an auction house.
“From Joan Mitchell to David Hammons, the Baums knew what they liked, were insatiably curious, and kept pushing their eye,” the family’s adviser, Wendy Cromwell, said in press materials quoted by ARTnews. Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s chairman for Europe, was quoted saying the couple “instinctively understood that artists like Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein were vital to the history of 20th-century abstraction and could sit perfectly well situated in their beautiful interiors alongside Rothko, Mitchell and others.”
That last phrase, “beautiful interiors,” is the key to the collection. Ruth Baum was a designer, and the Baums appear to have bought the way designers think, in terms of rooms, light and conversation between objects. ARTnews ran a photograph of their Florida home with a Lichtenstein study for Two Paintings: Sleeping Muse on the wall. It is a collection meant to be lived with, which is not always true of the trophies that pass through evening sales.
The competition
The Baum sale arrives in a season so stuffed with estates that it borders on the absurd. ARTnews reports that Sotheby’s has also secured 12 works from the Argentine collectors Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, expected to total some $450 million and led by a $180 million van Gogh, while Christie’s has announced a “distinguished collector” offering $100 million in Old Masters and contemporary art, led by a Picasso estimated at $40 million, a consignor reportedly identified as Jeff Koons. Against that backdrop, a $100 million estate is practically a boutique offering.
But that is precisely what makes it interesting. The Blaquier sale is a trophy hunt. The Baum collection is a portrait of a marriage and a taste, assembled across four decades with a designer’s eye and a cable executive’s patience. It is the kind of sale that tells you what the market thinks about the middle tier of postwar masterpieces, the $4 million Fontana and the $12 million Mitchell, rather than about the handful of nine-figure lots that dominate the headlines.
Where to see it
Highlights will tour Sotheby’s showrooms in London, Hong Kong, Paris, Los Angeles and New York, ARTnews reports. In New York, that means the Breuer building at 945 Madison Avenue, Sotheby’s headquarters, the Marcel Breuer landmark that was for decades the home of the Whitney. There is a pleasing irony in a Rothko bought by children of the ’60s hanging in a museum built in 1966, now repurposed as a salesroom. The building, like the pictures, has had a second life.
For the merely curious, previews are free. For the seriously acquisitive, the paddles go up on Nov. 16.
The City Politic has reached out to Sotheby’s and to Wendy Cromwell for comment, and will update this story with any response.
Photo: 945 Madison Avenue, the Breuer building, by Wil540 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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