A $100 million Baum art collection, led by a Rothko, heads to Sotheby's

Sotheby's will sell the collection of Ted Baum, a cable television magnate, and his wife Ruth, an interior designer, with the whole estimated to bring in excess of $100 million. The couple spent five decades assembling more than 130 works of American and European postwar and contemporary art.

Two works carry the highest estimates, each at $10 to $15 million: a Mark Rothko painting on paper and an Ed Ruscha painting. Three more pieces, by Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Andy Warhol, are tagged at $4 to $6 million apiece, Sotheby's said.

The rest of the collection has not yet been assigned estimates. Among the American names in the group are Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell and Tom Wesselmann. The European figures include Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni and Alberto Burri.

Two dozen works come to the block in a dedicated evening auction on November 16. More will follow in a day sale on November 17, and the remainder will be spread across various sales through next year. Highlights go on public view in London, Hong Kong, Paris, Los Angeles and New York.

The couple's collecting began in the 1970s, when Ruth bought a sketch by the American artist John Sloan at a charity auction. They went on to collect modern drawings and watercolors on paper by Fernand Leger and Pablo Picasso before moving into contemporary painting.

The Baums hoped their collecting would peak with one great painting, and they believed they found it in 1983, when they bought Rothko's untitled 1967 red-and-orange work on paper. Ruth described the moment plainly in press materials. "The Rothko hit us. That was it."

"We were children of the '60s, and the art of that period spoke to us," Ruth continued. In the 1990s the couple added Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, Hans Hofmann, Lichtenstein and Wesselmann. In the 2000s they bought Ruscha's Dimple, from 1964, in which a C-clamp appears to wrinkle the word's final e.

That Ruscha played to Ted's love of wordplay. They also acquired Warhol's 1984 work The Scream (After Edvard Munch), buying it at Sotheby's London in 2006 for £1.5 million, or $2.7 million then and roughly $4.5 million in today's money.

The Fontana, a Concetto Spaziale, Attese from 1960, cost the Baums far less when they bought it at Sotheby's London in 2000: £333,500, or $485,232 at the time and about $934,155 adjusted for inflation. It now carries an estimate in the millions.

Oliver Barker, the house's chairman for Europe, called Ted and Ruth among the most committed collectors of their generation. "No doubt they came to European abstraction via the touch points of postwar American abstraction," he said. "They instinctively understood that artists like Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein were vital."

The couple's advisor, New York's Wendy Cromwell, described a collection that "gallops through time, countries and genres." She said the Baums knew what they liked, were insatiably curious and kept pushing their eye, adding that the collection tells the story of collecting contemporary art.

The Baums kept homes in New York, New Jersey, Southampton and Palm Beach, and were active philanthropists in each place. Ted Baum died in 2021 and Ruth Baum followed this year. A gallery at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach carries their names.

The couple also funded the Norton's first contemporary art curator position and donated works by Dale Chihuly and Leo Villareal. Ruth was elected a life trustee in 2020. They served on boards and committees at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Parrish Art Museum.

Over her last two decades, Ruth supported the Palm Beach Zoo and Conservation Society, the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Palm Beach Dramaworks, and Planned Parenthood of Florida and New Jersey. The collection's sale will carry their legacy into the auction room.

The price rivals compete against

The Baum sale arrives as auction houses race to build anticipation for their November art sales. Days before, Sotheby's revealed twelve works from the Argentinian couple Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, expected to total $450 million and led by a $180 million Vincent van Gogh.

Christie's answered on Monday, announcing that a distinguished collector, reportedly the artist Jeff Koons, would offer $100 million in Old Masters and contemporary art led by a Picasso estimated at $40 million. Against those headliners, the Baums' Rothko is the quieter but no less storied counterpoint.

How we read the estimate

The numbers at the top of the Baum sale sit well below the records we track in our coverage of style and collecting.

Provenance does the heavy lifting here, a pattern we have documented before. In our most expensive jewelry ranking, pieces once owned by Marie Antoinette and Elizabeth Taylor sold for many times their pre-sale estimates, and the same lesson applies: the Baums' story, told through a half century of buying, adds to each canvas.