Sotheby’s will offer A New Vista: The David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection in New York this May, more than 50 works spanning seven decades of collecting, with a combined estimate of $37 million to $53 million. Highlights open the Modern Evening Auction on 19 May, followed by a dedicated single-owner sale ahead of the Modern Day Auction on 20 May, and the collection goes on view in New York from 2 May.
Leading it is Alberto Giacometti’s La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures), conceived in 1950 and cast in 1960 and estimated at $18 million to $25 million, widely regarded as one of the most important multi-figural sculptures of the postwar period. Giacometti arrived at the composition by chance: clearing his worktable one day, he set nine separately modeled figures on the floor and recognised in their random arrangement the forest glade he had long wanted to capture. It is joined by his bronze Buste d’homme (New York I) ($2 million to $3 million) and a group of Diego Giacometti’s patinated bronze furniture and objects.
Other highlights include Mark Rothko’s Untitled of about 1959 ($5 million to $7 million) and Wassily Kandinsky’s Zwei schwarze Streifen (Two Black Stripes) of 1930 ($2 million to $3 million). The dedicated day sale spans Contemporary and Modern art, design and prints, led by Roy Lichtenstein’s Entablature and a Still Life study (each $600,000 to $800,000) and Kenneth Noland’s Tab ($400,000 to $600,000).
The collection is the expression of a shared family vision built over seven decades. David Wingate began collecting as a child, moving from stamps to art, guided throughout his life by a single instinct: to seek out things of beauty and meaning and to live with them closely. “ Everything we bought, we really bought to enjoy,” he once said, “not to put in a vault as an investment.”
David and Shoshanna’s partnership lasted 67 years. The couple emigrated from Israel to the United States in 1953, settling on Long Island, and in New York they met the dealer Edith Halpert, an encounter David described as revealing “a new vista.” It drew the Wingates into American modernism and the circle of her Downtown Gallery. Shoshanna, a sculptor herself, deepened the collection’s engagement with work in three dimensions, and their son Ealan, later a figure in the art world, broadened it toward abstraction and Pop.
Their modernist home in Old Westbury, decorated by the designer John Saladino, placed Giacometti and Picasso bronzes against windows overlooking a forest glade and Tiffany Studios lamps beside paintings by Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. The Wingates were also longtime supporters of Jewish cultural and educational institutions, from the Jewish Theological Seminary to a graduate curatorial internship established in their name at The Jewish Museum in New York.
(Press Release)
