The New York Times‘s Carol Vogel gets first crack at Sotheby’s announcement of the sale of the Myers family collection. Led by two de Koonings, the sale is valued at $30m and will form the core of Sotheby’s November sale of Contemporary art:

This fall that sculpture will be sold at Sotheby’s along with some 99 other works that had belonged to Mrs. Myers, who died in December. Together with her husband, Louis S. Myers, a founder of Myers Industries who died in 1993, a tire business and maker of plastic storage containers, they amassed a collection of paintings and sculptures that included work by de Kooning, Calder, Judd and Noguchi. Most of the collection will be auctioned at Sotheby’s contemporary art sales on Nov. 11 and 12. There will also be some works in its Latin American auctions on November, and in its American paintings sale in December. All told, the collection is expected to bring about $30 million.

“In this climate when property has been difficult to find, everyone is after estate business,” said Tobias Meyer, director of Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide. But few estates have come up recently, so what little property has been up for grabs has been particularly sought after, making the Myers collection a coup.

Sotheby’s press release goes on to fill in some of the details of the collection. Twenty of the works will be in the November 11th evening sale. Another fifty will follow in the day sale and the remainder of the collection will find its way into appropriate sales later on. The Evening sale works include paintings by Alice Neel, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. There are works by Wayne Theibaud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Sculpture seems to have had a special appeal to the Myers and the sale includes works by Calder, Judd, Noguchi and Mark di Suvero.

A Little ‘Q’ Gets Its Day on the Block (New York Times)