In April and May 2026, Sotheby’s will offer a landmark selection from the Collection of Jean & Terry de Gunzburg, some 117 works carrying a combined estimate of $65 million to $96 million. The offering is led by Collection of Jean & Terry de Gunzburg, Design Masters, a single-owner auction on 22 April 2026 estimated in the region of $28.5 million to $42.5 million. Comprising 107 works, the sale is billed as the most valuable single-owner design sale in Sotheby’s history and the first standalone single-owner design sale staged at the house’s new home in the historic Breuer building.
For more than four decades, Jean and Terry de Gunzburg assembled one of the most seminal private collections of 20th century art and design. Shaped largely within their New York home, which they describe as “ New York on the outside, Paris on the inside,” the collection was arranged by their friend, the decorator Jacques Grange. Terry de Gunzburg spent fifteen years at Yves Saint Laurent Beauté, part of that time as Creative Director, and created the Touche Éclat concealer before founding her own brand, By Terry, in 1998. Jean de Gunzburg is a molecular and cell biologist who held senior roles at INSERM and the Institut Curie.
The design offering concentrates heavily on French artists and designers, bringing together works by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, Jean Royère, Alberto Giacometti, Jean-Michel Frank, Alexandre Noll, André Groult, Eugène Printz, Paul Dupré-Lafon, Pierre Chareau, Marc du Plantier, Jean Dunand, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, and Armand-Albert Rateau, among others. It sits in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks by Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Klee, which will be offered in Sotheby’s marquee sales in May 2026.
The sale follows Sotheby’s Design Week in December 2025, which achieved nearly $60 million in total at the Breuer Building. That week was led by François-Xavier Lalanne’s Hippopotame Bar, pièce unique, which realized $31.4 million, a world auction record for the artist and the most valuable design object ever sold at auction.
At the heart of the design sale is an important ensemble of fifteen mirrors by Claude Lalanne, made in gilt bronze, galvanized copper, and mirrored glass between 1974 and 1985 and estimated at $10 million to $15 million. The mirrors were commissioned for the Salon de Musique of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s Paris apartment. Executed by hand over a decade, they began with the first two mirrors Claude Lalanne ever created and expanded to a further thirteen, forming a fully realized environmental installation. The two original mirrors featured in a 1975 presentation devoted to Les Lalanne at the Centre National d’ Art Contemporain, and the ensemble was included in the 2010 Lalanne retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.
Further highlights include an André Groult shagreen, amazonite, ebony, and bronze cabinet, circa 1926, estimated at $600,000 to $800,000; a pair of monumental mahogany cabinets by Alexandre Noll, circa 1946, rising over six and a half feet tall, estimated at $700,000 to $1 million; a pair of Jean Dunand red lacquer armchairs, circa 1927, estimated at $150,000 to $200,000, alongside a selection of his lacquered metal vases estimated from $10,000 to $70,000; a pair of Jean-Michel Frank patinated wrought iron armchairs, circa 1928, from the Templeton Crocker residence in San Francisco, estimated at $250,000 to $350,000; a pair of Paul Dupré-Lafon cabinets from the 1930s estimated at $300,000 to $500,000; and Jean Royère’s “ Ours Polaire” Sofa and Pair of Armchairs, circa 1950, with the sofa and the pair of armchairs each estimated at $600,000 to $800,000.
(Press Release)
