Will Lehman's Art Be Lucky?

Fortune‘s William D. Cohan catalogs the Lehman sale of 800 works that will auctioned in three parts this fall:

The U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, which is overseeing Lehman’s bankruptcy’s proceeding (now in its second year) granted to Freeman’s, based in Philadelphia and which bills itself as “America’s oldest auction house,” the right to auction the first 283 lots of “modern and contemporary art” from Lehman’s collection. Anne Henry, a vice-president at Freeman’s in charge of the Lehman sale, valued the art being sold in the $500,000 to $750,000 range.

Obviously, Lehman’s creditors, who have lost most of their money, are hoping Freeman’s will be able to generate more proceeds than have been estimated. Freeman’s will also be auctioning off another 30 lots of European fine paintings, from the Lehman collection, on December 6, and another 500 lots, or so, also from the Lehman collection, on February 12 of next year. These two subsequent auctions are not expected to generate much in the way of proceeds either, according to Henry, perhaps between $280,000 and $430,000 from the two sales. […]

Still, the 283 lots that Freeman’s will be selling early next month do include any number of iconic images by many familiar artists. For instance, there is a group of 10 Berenice Abbott photographs of New York City street scenes (as well as one of the Flatiron Building) on which Freeman’s has placed a seemingly modest price range of between $6,000 and $10,000. There is a set of nine Walker Evans photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge, priced at $1,000 to $1,500. There is a Christo print of wrapped buildings in lower Manhattan ($1,000 to $1,500) and a signed Alexander Calder print ($800 to $1,200). There is a 1973 David Hockney print of spring flowers in a vase that Freeman pegged at between $7,000 and $10,000. […]

There are also a number of prints by artists such as Jim Dine, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenburg, Wayne Thiebaud, Yaccov Agam, Alex Katz, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Frank Stella, Robert Indiana, and Andy Warhol. In many ways, the collection is very typical of what Wall Street banks and law firms use to line the many walls of their offices. There are also a slew of works by lesser-known artists as well as French, Indian, and Chinese artists.