Sotheby’s is honored to present A New Vista: The David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection, comprising over 50 works spanning seven decades of passionate, purposeful collecting. Centered on a presentation across two days of Sotheby’s New York Sales this May, the collection carries a combined estimate of $37 - 53 million and brings to market an extraordinary group of paintings, sculptures, works on paper and design that together reflect a deeply personal and lifelong engagement with art. Highlights from the collection will lead off the Modern Evening Auction on May 19'.
Leading the collection is Alberto Giacometti's La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures), conceived in 1950 and cast in 1960, estimated at $18 - 25 million, and widely regarded as one of the most important multi-figural sculptures of the postwar period. It is joined by the bronze Buste d'homme (New York I), estimated at $2 - 3 million, and an exceptional group of works by Diego Giacometti, whose patinated bronze furniture and objects reflect the Wingates' lifelong conviction that art and design were inseparable pursuits. Further highlights include Mark Rothko's luminous Untitled, circa 1959, estimated at $5 - 7 million and Wassily Kandinsky's Zwei schwarze Streifen (Two Black Stripes), 1930, estimated at $2 - 3 million.
Collection Highlights:
Alberto Giacometti La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures)
Conceived in 1950 and cast in 1960
Est. $18–25 million
"La Clairière is one of those works that stops you completely. 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. It is among the most compelling works from this pivotal moment." Allegra Bettini, Head of the Modern Evening Auction, Sotheby's New York.
One of the centerpieces of the David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection, La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures) is among the most significant works Alberto Giacometti produced in the postwar period that would define his legacy. Conceived in the spring of 1950, the sculpture belongs to a trio of multifigural compositions — alongside La Forêt and La Place — that marked a turning point in Giacometti’s practice, representing his first sustained success in rendering the elongated, totemic figures that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his career. The work’s origins are as memorable as its appearance. Giacometti had been modeling individual figures separately over the course of several months, each one a study in the elusive challenge of placing a human presence convincingly in space. One day, clearing his worktable, he set the figures on the floor at random and found, in their accidental arrangement, precisely the composition he had been searching for. The resulting grouping of nine women, varied in scale and distributed across a shared rectangular base, evoked for him the memory of a forest glade he had once encountered and longed to paint.
“To my surprise,” he wrote his dealer Pierre Matisse, “the Composition with Nine Figures seemed to confirm the impression I had the previous autumn at the sight of a glade which attracted me greatly.” That the work prompted a rare moment of unguarded satisfaction from an artist defined by relentless self-questioning makes his words to Matisse all the more striking: “These are the first sculptures which are as I wanted.”
Cast in bronze by Susse Fondeur in Paris, the present example is one of a small number of casts from the edition, with others residing in the permanent collections of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
Alberto Giacometti Buste d'homme (New York I)
Conceived in 1965 and cast in 1972
Est. $2–3 million
Alberto Giacometti made his first sculpture at the age of thirteen, a head modeled after his younger brother Diego. More than fifty years later, it was Diego’s face that occupied him still, in the busts he produced during the final months of his life. Buste d'homme (New York I) belongs to this last, intensely distilled period, when Giacometti was compulsively revising the same forms from the model and form memory, each permutation as urgent as the last.
The title carries its own history. In 1965, Giacometti made his only visit to the United States, traveling to New York for his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Of the works he chose to include from his personal collection, just two appeared on the checklist, handwritten at the end of the printed document: the plaster predecessors of New York I and New York II. They were the only works he selected himself to represent his practice at that precise moment, among the last exhibitions of his lifetime. He died in 1966, months after returning to Europe. The surface of the present bronze registers that urgency directly. Every plane bears the trace of the artist’s hand, every gouge and accretion of bronzes preserving the immediacy of touch.
Where La Clairière places the human figure in relation to space and to others, Buste d'homme (New York I) distills the encounter to its most irreducible terms: one face, endlessly examined, never resolved.
Mark Rothko Untitled
Executed circa 1959
Est. $5–7 million
Executed circa 1959, at the height of Rothko's most fully realized decade, this oil on paper mounted on canvas work belongs to a body of paintings that critic Bonnie Clearwater once described as sometimes feeling more quintessentially Rothko than his painted canvases; their intimacy of scale producing a quality of attention that his monumental works approach differently. Its layered fields of jewel tones and amber are applied through the same nuanced feathering technique that defined his large-scale practice, dissolving hard edges into luminous, hovering zones of color that reward close and sustained looking.
The work sits at a pivotal moment in Rothko's career. In 1958 he had accepted the commission for the Seagram Murals, a body of work that would mark a shift from his saturated, luminous palette toward deeper, more somber tones. This painting captures the transition, its warmth and chromatic richness carrying the resonance of what was already becoming a more searching and interior vision. It was acquired by David Wingate at Sotheby's Parke Bernet in London in 1976, remaining in the collection for fifty years. It was later included in the first exhibition dedicated to Rothko's paintings on paper, the landmark 1984 to 1986 traveling show that originated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and toured major American institutions including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Wassily Kandinsky Zwei schwarze Streifen (Two Black Stripes)
Executed in 1930
Est. $2–3 million
The year 1930 was one of the most consequential of Kandinsky's career. That January, a major retrospective of his work was held at the Staatliches Museum in Saarbrücken, and art historian Will Grohmann published the first serious monograph devoted to the artist, cementing his place in the canon of modernism. It was against this backdrop that Zwei schwarze Streifen (Two Black Stripes) was painted, a work that stands as one of the most luminous expressions of everything Kandinsky had been working toward.
The canvas belongs to the final, most refined phase of his years at the Bauhaus, the legendary school founded by Walter Gropius around the unifying principles of art, design and their collective social power. Kandinsky had joined the faculty in 1921, and by 1930 was working in Dessau, where the school had relocated under Nazi pressure in 1925. His theoretical treatise Point and Line to Plane, published just a few years earlier, had sought to articulate the intrinsic forces of pictorial elements — shapes, lines, color, pattern — and Zwei schwarze Streifen reads as a luminous demonstration of those ideas in practice.
In keeping with the Bauhaus spirit of material experimentation, Kandinsky incorporated Ripolin, an enamel paint, alongside traditional oil, the resulting surface playing thin, glossy passages against more matte expanses in a way that rewards close looking. The painting is part of a suite of similarly formatted canvases from 1930, works from which are held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Musée d'arts de Nantes, among others, and has been widely exhibited since its creation across Europe, Japan and New York.
Varvara Stepanova Two Figures
Executed in 1921
Est. $1.2–1.8 million
Among the most historically significant works in the collection, Two Figures belongs to a series of 38 paintings Varvara Stepanova executed between 1919 and 1921, during a period of intense creative ferment that followed the Russian Revolution. Working at the intersection of art and ideology, Stepanova used this body of work to explore the movement of the human body through an entirely geometric visual language, constructing figures from interlocking angular forms that suggest motion rather than describe it. The series anticipated the design work for which she would become equally celebrated, as the ideas she developed in paint found their natural extension in the geometric textile and fashion designs she produced in the early 1920s. Works from the series were included in the landmark 1921 Moscow exhibition 5x5=25, widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the development of Construcivism, alongside works by Alexander Rodchenko, Stepanova's husband and close collaborator, Lyubov Popova, Alexandra Exter and Alexander Vesnin.
The painting's provenance is as remarkable as its art-historical pedigree. Retained by the artist's family for nearly seven decades, it was offered at Sotheby's groundbreaking 1988 auction of Russian Avant-Garde and Contemporary Soviet Art in Moscow, the only international auction ever to have taken place on Soviet soil, where it was acquired by the Wingates. Only one other oil painting by Stepanova has appeared at auction since, when Sotheby's offered Figure with Guitar, no. 3 from the same series in London in June 2014, where it achieved £1,650,500.
