We hear bankrupt investment firm Lehman Brothers is doing what any formerly wealthy person with an empty bank account would do when the auction house comes a-calling: sell it and don’t look back. Lehman’s multimillion dollar corporate art collection is being sold in 165 lots over the course of three sales this winter at Freeman’s in Philly. Check out the goods after the jump and get your paddles ready.
The Lehman Brothers collection consists mostly of postmodern and contemporary European and American art from the 1970s to the present. African-American sculptor and conceptual artist Willie Cole and French minimalist sculptor Bernar Venet will be offered in the first round of selling, along with a Louise Bourgeois print (pictured below), an abstract collage by Venezuelan artist Arturo Herrera, and a Roy Lichtenstein Lady Liberty print with an estimated reserve of $30,000.
Not announced in the three lots are a few of the Lehman collection’s heavy hitters: Louise Nevelson, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Wayne Thiebaud, to name a few.
Louise Bourgeois, Bed#2 (1997), Arturo Herrara collage
The projected $1 million in revenue from the auction will head straight to Lehman’s creditors. Too bad the firm will still owe a projected $249.999 billion. Perhaps they should dig into the Neuberger reserves? The money manager, acquired by Lehman in 2003, owns 900 works including major pieces by Marlene Dumas, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami. Kathleen Fuld, MoMA trustee and wife of disgraced CEO Richard Fuld, also sold a hefty portion of the couple’s immense post-war art collection last fall after the firm’s collapse in September.
If you’re serious about taking home a Lehman momento, you can even register with Freeman’s for updates on the next auction.