Sotheby’s will offer the Ted and Ruth Baum collection in a series of sales expected to exceed $100 million. The Ted and Ruth Baum collection features major American names including Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell, Ed Ruscha, Mark Rothko, and Tom Wesselmann, alongside European figures such as Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and Piero Manzoni. Leading the group are a Rothko work on paper and a Ruscha painting, each guided at $10 million to $15 million. Additional highlights include works by Burri, Fontana, and Andy Warhol, each estimated at $4 million to $6 million. Estimates for the remaining pieces have not yet been released.
Ted and Ruth Baum collection heads to auction
Two dozen works are slated for a dedicated evening auction on November 16, followed by further offerings in a day sale on November 17, with more to come across various sales next year. The collection totals more than 130 works. Top lots will tour Sotheby’s galleries in London, Hong Kong, Paris, Los Angeles, and New York for public exhibition.
“From Joan Mitchell to David Hammons, the Baums knew what they liked, were insatiably curious, and kept pushing their eye,” said the couple’s advisor, Wendy Cromwell of New York, in materials released by the auction house. She added that their holdings span eras, geographies, and styles, capturing what it means to collect contemporary art.
The couple maintained residences in New York, New Jersey, Southampton, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, and supported cultural and civic causes in those communities. Ted Baum died in 2021 and Ruth Baum died this year. A gallery at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach bears their name. They funded the museum’s first contemporary art curator role and donated works by artists including Dale Chihuly and Leo Villareal. Ruth became a life trustee in 2020. They also served on boards and committees at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Parrish Art Museum. Over the past 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.
Their collecting began in the 1970s when Ruth acquired a John Sloan drawing at a charity auction. They soon pursued modern works on paper by artists such as Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso. The couple hoped to crown their efforts with “one great painting,” which they believed they found in 1983 with Mark Rothko’s untitled 1967 red-and-orange painting on paper, the purchase that spurred their broader engagement with contemporary art.
“The Rothko hit us,” Ruth recalled in the materials. “That was it. We were children of the ’60s, and the art of that period spoke to us.”
In the 1990s, their focus expanded to artists including Mitchell, Sam Francis, Hans Hofmann, Lichtenstein, and Wesselmann. In the 2000s they acquired Ruscha’s Dimple (1964), in which a C-clamp appears to crease the final “e,” a nod to Ted’s fondness for wordplay, and Warhol’s 1984 The Scream (After Edvard Munch). They purchased the Warhol at Sotheby’s London in 2006 for £1.5 million, then about $2.7 million, or roughly $4.5 million in today’s dollars.
Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s chairman for Europe, described the pair as deeply engaged collectors. He noted that their curiosity and research led them from postwar American abstraction to European abstraction, recognizing the significance of artists such as Fontana and Klein. The couple bought their Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese (1960), at Sotheby’s London in 2000 for £333,500, or $485,232 at the time, approximately $934,155 adjusted for inflation.
The announcement of the Ted and Ruth Baum collection arrives as the auction houses prime the market for November sales. On Monday, Christie’s said a “distinguished collector” would sell $100 million in Old Masters and contemporary art, led by a Pablo Picasso estimated at $40 million, a trove widely reported to belong to artist Jeff Koons. Days earlier, Sotheby’s unveiled plans to sell 12 works from the collection of Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, expected to bring about $450 million, led by a Vincent van Gogh estimated at $180 million. For broader coverage of exhibitions, sales, and institutional moves, see Between Worlds: Art news, shows, and voices this week.