Christie’s Wins Battle for Herbert Lust Collection, Expected to Fetch More Than $50 M.

Christie’s has won the battle for the collection of the late Herbert Lust, the eccentric banker, scholar, and prolific collector whose holdings were being pursued by both of the major auction houses earlier this summer.

In August, ARTnews reported that Christie’s and Sotheby’s were duking it out for what remained of Lust’s sprawling collection following his death in May at the age of 99. At the time, sources familiar with the negotiations said the estate was shopping roughly 300 works collectively valued at around $60 million.

Christie’s will offer the collection beginning during its November marquee auctions in New York, with additional sales to follow in New York, London, and Paris. The auction house expects the collection to bring more than $50 million in total. Christie’s is handling the collection in collaboration with the Fine Art Group.

The biggest lot of the group is, as we reported last month, Alberto Giacometti’s Figure, demie grandeur (no. 2), which Christie’s has estimated at $20 million to $30 million. The 47-inch-tall bronze was made around 1949, the same year that Lust first met Giacometti while studying in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. The two became friends, and Lust would go on to become both an obsessive collector and a scholar of the artist’s work.

There is a wrinkle here: Sotheby’s lost the consignment despite having what appeared to be the inside track. The house had cultivated Lust for years, selling 27 Robert Indiana works from his collection in 2017 and, two years later, sending a camera crew to his Greenwich, Connecticut, home to film the collector surrounded by his Stellas, Bellmers, Calders, and Giacomettis. Christie’s, however, will get to sell them.

Along with the Giacometti, the collection includes Frank Stella’s Les Indes Galantes (1962), estimated at $7 million to $10 million. Christie’s says it is one of four related large-scale Stella works that made that year, with the other three in museum collections. It has not appeared at auction in nearly 25 years.

Other highlights include Yves Tanguy’s Qui répondra?, estimated at $2 million to $3 million; Hans Bellmer’s Jointure de boules (La Poupée), estimated at $1.5 million to $2.5 million; Robert Indiana’s LOVE Wall, estimated at $800,000 to $1.2 million; Alexander Calder’s Pomegranate Pods, estimated at $500,000 to $700,000; and another Giacometti, the 1946 painting Chaise jaune dans l’atelier, estimated at $400,000 to $600,000.

The result for the Bellmer could be particularly interesting. Lust collected the Surrealist in extraordinary depth—he once joked that he could buy 50 great Bellmers for the price of one great Magritte—and Christie’s says Jointure de boules is the artist’s largest and most important construction from the 1930s remaining in private hands. The house expects it to set a new auction record for Bellmer.

Lust’s collection was built over the better part of a century and was deeply tied to his friendships with artists. He met Giacometti at 22 while studying comparative literature at the Sorbonne and later wrote a memoir about their friendship as well as a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s graphic work. He also produced a catalogue raisonné of Enrico Baj and wrote extensively on Bellmer.

By the end of his life, Lust had already given away hundreds of works. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art received substantial holdings, including some 200 Giacomettis, while the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden received more than 70 photographs in 2020. Even after those gifts, Lust still had more than 1,000 objects split between his Greenwich home and Manhattan pied-à-terre.

The November sales will therefore represent only the latest chapter in the dispersal of a collection that Lust spent most of his adult life assembling. But after a summer in which the two biggest auction houses were competing for the right to sell what remained, Christie’s gets the gavel.