Mall Mogul’s $500M Picasso and Modigliani Trove Goes on Block
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Works by Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Amedeo Modigliani are going up for auction from the late U.S. mall developer A. Alfred Taubman’s collection, which is valued at more than $500 million, Sotheby’s said on Friday.
The auction house said the more than 500 works stretching from antiquity to contemporary art make up the most valuable private collection ever offered at auction.
The collection will be auctioned in New York in a series of sales starting in November.
Taubman, a billionaire who founded the shopping mall business Taubman Centers Inc, died in April at the age of 91. In 1983, he bought Sotheby’s and is credited with revolutionizing the way auction houses did business by pioneering such sales as the jewels of the Duchess of Windsor and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis estate in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the early 2000s, Taubman was tried and jailed for 10 months for an international price-fixing conspiracy with competing auction house Christie’s.
Proceeds from the sales will be used to settle estate tax obligations and fund the A. Alfred Taubman Foundation, Sotheby’s said.
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