Art that once belonged to late Warner Bros. music director Mo Ostin is set to fetch more than $120 million at Sotheby’s auction in May, one of several notable sole proprietor collections that have been consigned this season.
Ostin led Warner Bros. Records for over 30 years and has been a leading figure in the music industry for over half a century. He worked with artists such as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr in the 1950s, and in later decades artists such as Madonna, Prince, Green Day and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He died last year at 95 years old.
Ostin also collected art for about 50 years. In May, Sotheby’s will offer around thirty works from its collection, which the auction house estimates at more than 120 million dollars. Works up for auction include pieces by René Magritte, Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Cecily Brown, Takashi Murakami and Pablo Picasso.
Cy Twombly’s Untitled (1962) Courtesy of Sotheby’s
The evening sale dedicated to works from the Ostin collection will be animated by two paintings by Magritte: The Empire of Lights (1951) and The Domain of Arnheim (1949). The Empire of Lights has not been seen in public since Ostin acquired it in 1979, although comparable works from his series of 17 paintings with the same title are in the collections of institutions such as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. Last year a large painting from 1961 by Magritte The Empire of Lights series sold at Sotheby’s London for £51.5 million (£59.4m with fees), setting a new auction record for the Belgian surrealist.
Ostin received The Domain of Arnheim by his close friend and titan of the music industry David Geffen, one of the most eminent collectors of art and artistic philanthropists-from his own collection as a thank you for helping him establish Asylum Records. Ostin insisted on paying Geffen a fair price in exchange, according to Sotheby’s, which expects it to fetch around $20 million at auction.
Other highlights from Ostin’s collection include Twombly’s Untitled (1962), which the artist painted in Rome during his “baroque period” which was influenced by Italy’s architecture, art, poetry and pantheon of ancient gods. View of the moon (1984) by Basqiuat has not been seen in public for more than two decades, according to Sotheby’s.
Countryside (1965) by Pablo Picasso Courtesy of Sotheby’s
two digits (1946-47) by De Kooning will make its first auction appearance in more than 30 years as part of the sale, according to Sotheby’s. The painting was once part of the collection of Joseph H. Hazen, the former vice president and director of Warner Bros. Ostin acquired Cecily Brown’s Free games for May (2015) just one year after its painting. by Picasso Countryside (1965), formerly in the collection of Picasso’s late daughter Mayais a rare landscape of Mougins, France, where Picasso spent the last 12 years of his life.
Ostin’s collection is the latest in a growing number of significant collections to be auctioned in May in New York. Recent high-profile shipments from collectors or their estates include the Chicago commodity trader Alan Press and his wife Dorothy, the late Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston administrator Gerald Fineberg, and other works from the publishing billionaire’s record collections SI Newhouse and co-founder of Microsoft Paul Allen.
