Calder, Smith and Pousette-Dart Feature in Christie’s $50m Kahn Sale

Graham Bowley announces Christie’s consignment from the Kahn family, Arthur and Anita who lived on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive:

Christie’s is selling 400 objects from the Kahn collection, with a total value estimated at over $50 million. The first lots will be part of the auction house’s New York evening sales in November. The remainder will appear in sales in Paris, London and New York.

Among them are 80 works by the American sculptor Alexander Calder, whom the Kahns befriended. They visited him in Connecticut and France, and Calder’s gouaches and his bold, colorful sculptures in sheet metal and bent wire — intimate and airy — populated their rooms. […]

There are other valuable pieces in the collection, like “Tanktotem VIII,” a 1960 work by the American Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith, valued at $2 million to $3 million, and works by big-name Modern artists, like Fernand Léger. The American postwar artist Richard Pousette-Dart’s “Blood Wedding,” from 1958, dominated their living room.

Christie’s to Sell Collection of Arthur and Anita Kahn Beginning This Fall (The New York Times)