Sotheby’s to Sell Barbara Gladstone Estate Works During New York Design Week
A car hood sculpture by Richard Prince and a midcentury Jean Prouvé sideboard will anchor Sotheby’s upcoming sale from the estate of Barbara Gladstone, a lineup that places contemporary art and design in unusually close conversation. The auction, scheduled for Tuesday, June 9, will offer 140 lots during New York design week and is expected to bring between $6.9 million and $10 million.
A public preview opens June 2 at Sotheby’s Madison Avenue headquarters. The sale follows a May 15 auction of a dozen Gladstone artworks that brought $18.5 million with fees, underscoring the market’s appetite for material associated with the influential dealer’s collection.
Leading the sale is Richard Prince’s Medusa (2003), from the artist’s “Hoods” series, which uses the hoods of American muscle cars as sculptural material. Sotheby’s has placed an estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million on the work. Other examples from the series are held by institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, a reminder of how quickly Prince’s work moved from the market into museum collections.
Two other works share the sale’s highest estimate of $600,000: Kai Althoff’s mixed-media Unter der Autobahnbrücke (2003), which depicts a group gathered beneath an elevated roadway, and Alex Katz’s portrait Halsey 9 (2022). The design section is led by a ca. 1948 sideboard by French designer Jean Prouvé, estimated at $120,000 to $180,000. According to analytics company ARTDAI, Prouvé’s design pieces have reached as much as $1.7 million, the price of a table sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2021.
Lisa Dennison, Sotheby’s chairman, Americas, said the sale reflects a shared interest in materiality and texture. Looking at Prince’s car hood sculpture, she said she sees “something that’s between art and architecture and sculpture,” and noted similar coloration in the Prouvé cabinet. “I think Barbara appreciated echoes,” Dennison said.
The broader selection includes works and design pieces by Matthew Barney, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Pierre Paulin, Jean Royère, and Franz West. Taken together, the sale suggests how Gladstone’s collecting moved fluidly between postwar design and contemporary art, with surface, structure, and visual wit serving as common ground.
