Colin Gleadell has the post position on Phillips’ announcement that it will be selling the Aberbach collection, featuring four drawings by Matisse and Picasso.

Julian Aberbach was a country music publisher (read Gleadell for the extraordinary details of his life story) and his brother wound up as an art dealer:

His brother, Jean, meanwhile, opened a gallery in New York which Julian also maintained an interest in. Their collections included major works by Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti, some of which were generously donated to museums. A de Kooning landscape and Robert Motherwell’s ‘Elegy to the Spanish Republic’, for example, were given by the brothers to the Rose Art Museum in 1964, and two superb surrealist paintings by Paul Delvaux were given by Julian to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the late 1970s. The dozens of gifts the two made would be worth well over 100 million dollars at today’s prices. […]

These four drawings are the jewels in a wider selection of works from the Aberbach collection which are to be sold by Phillips in London and New York. Their estimates range from $800,000 to $1.8 million , and record prices could be on the cards for a Matisse head and shoulder drawing and for a Picasso drawing of Francoise Gilot.

Its Now Or Never: Matisse and Picasso treasures from Elvis Presley’s publisher up for auction (Telegraph)