The Triumph of Painting: The Steven and Ann Ames Collection

Sotheby’s New York autumn season will be led by “The Triumph of Painting: The Steven and Ann Ames Collection”.

The landmark collection, assembled by Steven and Ann Ames, New York patrons of the arts, philanthropists and collectors, tells the story of painting over the past 50 years through masterpieces by Robert Ryman, Georg Baselitz, Willem de Kooning, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Philip Guston and others. Overall, the works are estimated to fetch in excess of $100 million in Sotheby’s sales of Contemporary Art on 17 & 18 November.

At the core of the collection are outstanding works by two giants of 20th-century painting: Gerhard Richter and Willem de Kooning. Richter was one of the first painters to spark the couple’s interest after they fell in love with his work in the 1980s; indeed Steven wrote his thesis on the artist to earn his Master’s degree in Art History at Columbia University. The Evening Auction on 17 November will include Richter canvases from every major period of his career covering his full exploration of the medium – abstract, landscape, portraiture, conceptual and more. Robert Ryman and others then entered the collection before the Ames’s sought out paintings by Willem de Kooning, seeking to connect the legacies of these different artists and bridge the stylistic gaps between them.

Image above: Gerhard Richter, A.B., St. James, 1988. Oil on canvas. Estimate $20/30 million