NEW YORK, NY.- The personal collection of trailblazing gallerist and artist champion Marian Goodman will headline Christie's Spring Marquee Week offerings of 20th and 21st Century art in New York this May.

Breaking Ground: The Private Collection of Marian Goodman comes from the Manhattan home of Marian Goodman, a consummate collector and renowned gallerist whose life and work shaped the development of the contemporary art landscape, and whose legacy includes the careers of countless artists she advocated for and supported, including Gerhard Richter, whose work is prevalent in the works she kept closest.

Ms. Goodman's private collection will be presented in a series of three cohesive auctions, beginning with a single-owner sequence of seven sublime paintings by Gerhard Richter at the start of the 21st Century Evening Sale on May 20.

Marian's Richters include seven works executed by the artist from 1982 to 2009, offering a visual map of Ms. Goodman's transformative relationship with the artist, including her key role introducing his work with the United States market. The works range from $30,000 to $50,000, to $35 million to $50 million.

The evening sale will be named “Marian's Richters and 21st Century Evening Sale,” an appropriate tribute to Ms. Goodman's impact on contemporary art as we know it today, and on the auction world's only night focused entirely on art from the 1980s to the present—the same period when Ms. Goodman and Mr. Richter established themselves as leading figures in contemporary art.

Additional works from Ms. Goodman's private collection will be offered in a dedicated, single-owner sequence to open the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale and as a dedicated single-owner online sale. The works are being offered by Ms. Goodman's family and do not include those by artists currently represented by Ms. Goodman's gallery.

The total estimate of the collection is in the region of $65 million.

“In Marian Goodman's home, Richter masterpieces were juxtaposed with breathtaking views of Manhattan, unearthing central themes of artist's richly varied practice,” said Johanna Flaum, Christie's Vice Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art. “Cohesively, Marian's Richters will present the market with a revelatory moment unlike anything that has come before. These works present new tensions between abstraction and representation, between personal and collective memory, through a deeply truthful representation of the intertwined legacies of Richter and Marian Goodman. Christie's is so proud and humbled to commemorate Ms. Goodman this spring in this celebratory sale among her peers, admirers, and the next generation of contemporary collectors.”

The leading highlight is an exceptional painting from 1982, entitled Kerze (Candle) (estimate: $35 – 50 million). A lone candle with a flame seemingly emanating from within the canvas itself, the work is a meditation on vanitas and a symbol of quiet revolution. The poignant imagery represents Ms. Goodman's faith and prescience, and her early acquisition of the work demonstrates her deep understanding of Richter's groundbreaking practice.

The sale also features superb examples from the mid to late 1990s, a period of sustained productivity for Richter, during which his Abstraktes Bild achieved new heights of formal invention. Standing paramount among them is Mohn, a work from 1995 that takes its title from the German word for “poppy”—one of the artist's rare concessions to a figurative reference within his abstract work. The painting made its debut in the landmark exhibition Gerhard Richter. 100 Bild at the Carré d'Art in Nîmes in the summer of 1996 before traveling to Ms. Goodman's own gallery that fall and remaining in her private collection since.

Marian Goodman was a truly extraordinary gallerist who had the rare ability and foresight to recognize true genius, and as a result, her impact on the art world was unparalleled.

“She had a sixth sense,” said her daughter Amy Goodman. “She could meet somebody and see ahead, she could see their career. She had real intuition. I called the gallery my mom's garden. She had a unique focus on building and growing careers . . . She has such a deep understanding of the power of beauty, and that it is a real force on this Earth, and real medicine for our hearts and souls. She was a great champion of that.”

A lifelong New Yorker, Ms. Goodman was born Marian Ruth Geller in 1928. A devoted mother—known to stay up all night planning creative birthday parties, and who once organized the first art show fundraiser for her children's school, The Walden School—she enrolled at Columbia University in 1963 and became the only woman graduate in her art history program. Two years later, she began on what would become a lifelong career in the artworld with the co-founding of Multiples Inc., a company that published affordable prints of works by notable contemporary artists, and in 1977, she began her now-legendary eponymous gallery on 57th Street in New York City, opening with a solo show of Marcel Broodthaers.

“My mother was incredibly generous and also very fierce,” said her daughter Amy Goodman. “She had to find her deep strength in a world that was not that accepting of women at the time . . . so many young women tell me how grateful they were to my mom for guidance.”

Ms. Goodman was known as a mentor, and a tireless advocate for artists. “Mom did so well over the years, but that was never her primary purpose,” said Amy Goodman. “Her purpose was to get the best exposure for her artists . . . a lot of the artists that she has chosen over the years have a strong social point of view. A social justice mission. And she would fiercely advocate for them.”

“My mother never sought the light for herself—she stood just beyond it, quietly shaping the glow so her artists could shine more brightly,” said her son Michael Goodman. “There was a deep, instinctive selflessness in her— a devotion not to recognition, but to creation, to others, to possibility. Her greatest joy was in the work itself: in long, tireless days beside the artists she believed in, helping bring their visions into the world. And mine— mine was simply to watch her there, fully alive in that exchange, present, purposeful, and quietly extraordinary.”

In 1985, Ms. Goodman began representing Gerhard Richter and in doing so, was consciously taking a risk. Despite establishing a strong presence in Germany, his market in the United State had yet to flourish. A decades-long partnership rooted in trust and mutual respect ensued, and Ms. Goodman soon became the primary conduit through which Richter's works were acquired by the world's most important global collectors, and along the way, in an act of love and admiration, held onto prime examples of the artist's work from each of the major junctures in his practice. In 2015, a 1986 example of Richter's Abstraktes Bild canvases sold for a price of $46.3 million, not only setting a new record for the artist but establishing a record price at the time for any living European artist. Five years later, he would reach another benchmark with a work selling in Hong Kong for $27.6 million and establishing the highest price in Asia for a Western artist at the time. Today, he is regarded as the most historically important living artist celebrated by the world's most esteemed collectors from around the world, spanning multiple generations.

“She was a giant at five-foot-two,” Amy Goodman said of her mother, who passed away in January 2026. “She had an incredible deep love and reverence for what humanity has created, the very best of it.”

And Amy Goodman says that legacy endures, both through the works finding their next chapter, and through the gallery that continues to bear her name. “Marian Goodman Gallery continues to embody Marian's foundational values of supporting the artists we represent, with loyalty, fierceness, and an enduring dedication to advancing their vision through rigorous exhibitions and institutional partnerships,” she said.

Highlights from the collection will tour globally to Paris, London and Los Angeles ahead of the full sale exhibition at Christie's New York Rockefeller Center galleries in May.