Sotheby’s to Sell a $37 M. Cache of Works Once Owned by Armand Hammer, National Gallery of Art Names New Head of Art of Americas Department, and More: Industry Moves for September 23, 2026

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Big Number: $37 M.

That’s the high estimate for a cache of a dozen works once owned by late oil tycoon Armand Hammer. Sotheby’s will offer them as part of its modern art evening sale in November, held as part of the New York marquee auctions. The top lot of the Hammer sale is expected to be Edgar Degas’s ca. 1899 painting Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes), which carries an estimate of $10 million to $15 million. Other highlights include Mary Cassatt’s 1894–95 Summertime (estimate $7 million–$10 million), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1888 Antibes ($2.5 million–$3.5 million), and Camille Pissarro’s ca. 1883 Paysage à Osny, vue de la ferme ($2 million–$3 million).

The estimates that the collection will bring in between $25 million and $37 million, an amount that will benefit the Armand Hammer Foundation’s grants for arts education and institutions. Given Hammer’s connection to Los Angeles (he is the namesake of the Hammer Museum), it’s appropriate that the 12 works from the collection are on view at Sotheby’s outpost in Los Angeles from September 23–25. In a release, Jacqueline Wachter, who runs the Sotheby’s LA office, said, “Armand Hammer’s imprint on Los Angeles is difficult to overstate. He believed that collecting art came with an obligation to share it, a conviction that shaped not only his own museum but decades of gifts to institutions across this city and beyond.”

Industry Moves

National Gallery of Art Hires Virginia Anderson: She will join the Washington, D.C. museum in November as senior curator of American art and head of the art of the Americas. She is currently senior curator of American art and department head of American painting and sculpture and decorative arts at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Julia Phillips Wins K21 Global Art Award 2026: The Chicago- and Berlin-based artist is known for her sculptures in metal and ceramics, as well as producing works on paper and video. The €100,000 prize recognizes “artists who, through an independent artistic vision, provide new impetus for international contemporary art,” per a release.

Alison Jacques Takes on Quentin James McCaffrey: The New York–based artist’s “carefully constructed, timeless interiors that are imagined yet feel anchored in reality,” as described in a release, are on view at the London gallery until October 3.

Christelle Oyiri Joins Galerie Buchholz: The Paris-based artist had a solo exhibition at Amant in Brooklyn earlier this year, and a commission for Castello di Rivoli’s “Inserzioni” program goes on view this week. She will continue to be represented by the Gathering in London.

YveYANG Now Represents Stephen Lichty: The Tribeca gallery presented a solo show for the San Francisco–based artist earlier this year.

Palm Springs Art Museum Names Next Q+ Art Curator-at-Large: César García-Alvarez, the founding executive and artistic director of the Mistake Room in Los Angeles, will oversee the initiative’s next two-year curatorial programming. His first exhibition at the museum, “(Enter Pirates),” opened last week in the Montgomery Gallery, which is dedicated to the Q+ Art program.

Tallinn Art Hall Names New Director: Maria Arusoo will begin leading the Estonian institution on January 1. She has been the director of the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art since 2013.

Emily Schaffer Joins Huntington T. Block: Currently vice president and team leader for fine arts at Risk Strategies Company, Schaffer is now senior vice president of fine art insurance at Huntington T. Block.

Read This.

The London gallery Ben Elwes Fine Art has been hard at work the past few years shedding light on the career of Alejandro Mario Yllanes, a Bolivian painter who studied under Diego Rivera and whose work has been overlooked until recently. Yllanes, who canvases are searing indictments of the Bolivian government’s treatment of Indigenous people during the first half of the 20th century, abandoned the majority of his work in an Upper West Side apartment after 1950, roughly a decade before his death. Since the gallery’s first show for Yllanes in fall 2023, its owners, Rachel and Ben Elwes, have sold nearly two dozen works for prices between $400,000 to $1.9 million, reports the New York Times. Among their buyers have been the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine, and the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, which acquired Lake Titicaca (1935) in May. Writer Victoria Burnett dives deep into Yllanes’s fascinating life and art, which art historian Michele Greet describes as a “significant discovery.”