The collection of modern and contemporary art built over some seven decades by David and Shoshanna Wingate will come to auction at Sotheby’s New York and London over evening and day sales on May 19 and 20. The group of over 50 works, including canonical artists like Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, Roy Lichtenstein, Kenneth Noland, Mark Rothko, and Varvara Stepanova, is estimated to sell for between $37 million and $53 million. Leading the collection and accounting for as much as half its value is Giacometti’s La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures), conceived in 1950 and cast in 1960; the work is estimated at between $18 million and $25 million.
Also by the Swiss artist is Buste d’homme (New York I), estimated at $2 million–$3 million. “La Clairière is one of those works that stops you completely,” said Allegra Bettini, Sotheby’s New York head of the modern evening auction, in press materials. “Giacometti arrived at this composition by chance, and yet it feels utterly inevitable—nine figures that seem to hold the weight of everything he would go on to explore for the rest of his career.” The artist was working on a number of individual figures and one day, while clearing his worktable, placed them on the floor and was struck by the arrangement, preserved in this piece.
“These are the first sculptures which are as I wanted,” Giacometti wrote to his Paris dealer, Pierre Matisse. Other examples of the editioned piece reside in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. Rothko’s Untitled (ca. 1959), a luminous oil on paper mounted on canvas in his trademark style of three stacked, hazy rectangles of color, is estimated at $5 million–$7 million.
Wingate bought it at Sotheby’s Parke Bernet in London in 1976. It appeared in the first exhibition dedicated to Rothko’s paintings on paper, a 1984–86 show that originated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and toured major American institutions including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mark Rothko, Untitled, ca. 1959.
Born in Israel, David (1921–2011) lived in Old Wesbury, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida. The president of Hi-Shear Industries, an aerospace contractor, he started out collecting stamps as a child, and graduated to art and design, ranging from Tiffany lamps to paintings by leading artists of his time, often focusing on renditions of the human figure. Shoshanna, born in Syracuse, New York, and herself a sculptor, and died at 104 years of age this past January.
The couple began collecting upon meeting pioneering New York dealer Edith Halpert, and acquired many works from her Downtown Gallery by artists like Ben Shahn, Abraham Rattner, and William Zorach. Over the years, they expanded their purview to collect works by major 20th-century figures Giacometti, Kandinsky, Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso. The Wingates would also collect from European galleries; they bought Giacometti’s La Clairière at Galerie Maeght in Paris and his Léger at Galerie Louise Leiris, according to their son, Ealan Wingate.
Shoshanna and David Wingate’s 1943 engagement photo. Ealan Wingate became the first director of legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend’s SoHo gallery in 1971, when he was only 23 years old. After working with his father at Hi-Shear Industries, Wingate fils opened his own gallery, Koury Wingate, and upon its closure in 1990, he began a 35-year tenure as a director of Gagosian Gallery.
He has led teams to create numerous books devoted to artists with whom he has worked, including Georg Baselitz, Cecily Brown, Howard Hodgkin, Anselm Kiefer, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly. In one way, it’s fitting that the collection should come to the auction block, as Ealan Wingate explains. “Of course Dad bought from many galleries, but what he really loved was buying at auction,” he told ARTnews in an email.
“He liked the immediacy, the competition, the excitement, and he also appreciated the accuracy of the pricing. Most of his auction buys were at Sotheby’s and the earlier Parke Bernet. He bought his Stepanova and his Rodchenko at a singular Sotheby’s auction in Moscow.” “Everything we bought, we really bought to enjoy,” David Wingate once said, “not to put in a vault as an investment.” “Dad’s great pleasure was bringing his new acquisitions home—choosing a place for it, having it hung, having it join the others, visiting it,” said Ealan Wingate.
“His collection was a sort of community of beautiful things. As he was buying more works that were contemporary, he often kept the paintings he loved that he had purchased decades before on the walls with the new: Abraham Rattner keeping company with Ed Ruscha.” Their Old Westbury home provided space to live with and display their collection, with Giacometti and Picasso sculptures set against large windows that overlooked a forest glade, and Tiffany lamps accompany