NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s will present A New Vista: The David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection, comprising over 50 works spanning seven decades of passionate, purposeful collecting. Centered on a presentation across two days of Sotheby’s New York Sales this May, the collection carries a combined estimate of $37 - 53 million and brings to market an extraordinary group of paintings, sculptures, works on paper and design that together reflect a deeply personal and lifelong engagement with art. Highlights from the collection will lead off the Modern Evening Auction on May 19, followed by a dedicated single owner sale ahead of the Modern Day Auction on May 20.
Leading the collection is Alberto Giacometti's La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures), conceived in 1950 and cast in 1960, estimated at $18 - 25 million, and widely regarded as one of the most important multi-figural sculptures of the postwar period. It is joined by the bronze Buste d'homme (New York I), estimated at $2 - 3 million, and an exceptional group of works by Diego Giacometti, whose patinated bronze furniture and objects reflect the Wingates' lifelong conviction that art and design were inseparable pursuits. Further highlights include Mark Rothko's luminous Untitled, circa 1959, estimated at $5 - 7 million and Wassily Kandinsky's Zwei schwarze Streifen (Two Black Stripes), 1930, estimated at $2 - 3 million. The dedicated single-owner sale preceding the Modern Day Auction will present a cross-category selection spanning Contemporary and Modern art, Design and Prints, highlighted by Roy Lichtenstein’s Entablature and Still Life with Coffee Pot and Flower Pot (Study), estimated at $600,000–800,000 each, and Kenneth Noland's Tab, estimated at $400,000–600,000, a signature canvas from the artist's celebrated target series.
At its core, the David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection is the expression of a shared family vision, one that took shape over seven decades. David Wingate began acquiring objects as a child, starting with stamps and ultimately art, driven throughout his life by the same instinct: to seek out things of beauty and meaning, to study them closely, and to live with them intimately. From Tiffany Studios lamps to bronze sculpture, from works on paper to canonical paintings of the twentieth century, the collection is united not by period or medium but by the quality of attention that produced it.
The collection's range reflects a sensibility that was always expanding. David was drawn above all to the human figure, to the ways in which artists across centuries and styles returned again and again to the challenge of rendering a person in space. Shoshanna's own practice as an artist deepened the collection’s engagement with works in three dimensions. Their son, Ealan, who would go on to a distinguished career in the art world, played an increasingly central role in shaping the collection’s ambitions, broadening his parents’ engagement with abstraction and Pop art.
"Our father approached collecting the way he approached everything in life — with curiosity, patience and an instinct for what was truly worth his attention. From the stamps he saved as a boy to the works of art he lived with for decades, the impulse was always the same: to find things of lasting beauty and to understand them deeply. What he and our mother built together, was never a collection in the formal sense. It was simply the way they chose to live."
Batsheva Ostrow
DAVID & SHOSHANNA WINGATE
David and Shoshanna Wingate’s story began in Israel, where Shoshanna, born in Syracuse, New York, had moved with her family as a child. There she met David, and the two began a partnership that would last 67 years, one shaped by a deep sense of shared identity, a commitment to their community and an abiding love of beautiful things. In 1953, the couple emigrated to the United States with their children, Batsheva and Ealan, settling on Long Island, where they would remain for the rest of their lives.
After arriving in the United States, their relationship with art deepened considerably. Drawn to New York’s galleries and museums, they soon encountered Edith Halpert, an introduction that David later described as revealing “a new vista.” Through Halpert, the Wingates entered the world of American modernism, with David acquiring works by Ben Shahn, Abraham Rattner, William Zorach and other artists in the Downtown Gallery’s celebrated stable. It was through these same visits to the gallery that Ealan first developed the eye that would help shape not only his own career but the collection itself.
From that foundation, the collection grew steadily over seven decades, eventually encompassing paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and design by some of the most celebrated artists of the modern and contemporary eras, among them Alberto Giacometti, Diego Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, and Andy Warhol. Throughout, David’s guiding principle remained consistent. “Everything we bought, we really bought to enjoy,” he once said, “not to put in a vault as an investment.”
For the Wingates, collecting was inseparable from the way they lived. Their home in Old Westbury, designed in a distinctly modernist idiom and decorated by the renowned interior designer John Saladino, was conceived as an environment in which art and design existed in continuous dialogue. Works were placed with care and intention: Giacometti sculptures and Picasso bronzes were positioned against large
windows overlooking a forest glade, their forms animated by natural light; Tiffany Studios lamps stood alongside paintings by Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, their luminous glass connecting the decorative and the painterly. For David and Shoshanna, the home itself was the collection's fullest expression.
Shoshanna Wingate brought to the collection not only a collector's eye, but that of an artist. A sculptor herself, her own practice deepened the couple's sustained engagement with works at every scale, from intimate bronzes to monumental figure groups, and gave her an artist's instinct for what made a work truly alive in space.
The Wingates' commitment to their community and to the institutions that sustained Jewish cultural life expressed itself through decades of generous philanthropy. The North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Solomon Schechter School and Temple Beth Sholom in Roslyn Heights were among the many beneficiaries of their giving, and their impact endures in programs and institutions that bear their names, among them the Shoshanna and David Wingate Graduate Curatorial Internship at The Jewish Museum in New York.
Collection Highlights:
Alberto Giacometti
La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures)
Conceived in 1950 and cast in 1960 Est. $18–25 million
"La Clairière is one of those works that stops you completely. Giacometti arrived at this composition by chance, and yet it feels utterly inevitable — nine figures that seem to hold the weight of everything he would go on to explore for the rest of his career. It is among the most compelling works from this pivotal moment." -- Allegra Bettini, Head of the Modern Evening Auction, Sotheby's New York
One of the centerpieces of the David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection, La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures) is among the most significant works Alberto Giacometti produced in the postwar period that would define his legacy. Conceived in the spring of 1950, the sculpture belongs to a trio of multifigural compositions — alongside La Forêt and La Place — that marked a turning point in Giacometti’s practice, representing his first sustained success in rendering the elongated, totemic figures that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his career.
The work’s origins are as memorable as its appearance. Giacometti had been modeling individual figures separately over the course of several months, each one a study in the elusive challenge of placing a human presence convincingly in space. One day, clearing his worktable, he set the figures on the floor at random and found, in their accidental arrangement, precisely the composition he had been searching for. The resulting grouping of nine women, varied in scale and distributed across a shared rectangular base, evoked for him the memory of a forest glade he had once encountered and longed to paint. “To my surprise,” he wrote his dealer Pierre Matisse, “the Composition with Nine Figures seemed to confirm the impression I had the previous autumn at the sight of a glade which attracted me greatly.” That the work prompted a rare moment of unguarded satisfaction from an artist defined by relentless self-questioning makes his words to Matisse all the more striking: “These are the first sculptures which are as I wanted.”
Cast in bronze by Susse Fondeur in Paris, the present example is one of a small number of casts from the edition, with others residing in the permanent collections of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
Alberto Giacometti
Buste d'homme (New York I) Conceived in 1965 and cast in 1972 Est. $2–3 million
Alberto Giacometti made his first sculpture at the age of thirteen, a head modeled after his younger brother Diego. More than fifty years later, it was Diego’s face that occupied him still, in the busts he produced during the final months of his life. Buste d'homme (New York I) belongs to this last, intensely distilled period, when Giacometti was compulsively revising the same forms from the model and form memory, each permutation as urgent as the last.
The title carries its own history. In 1965, Giacometti made his only visit to the United States, traveling to New York for his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Of the works he chose to include from his personal collection, just two appeared on the checklist, handwritten at the end of the printed document: the plaster predecessors of New York I and New York II. They were the only works he selected himself to represent his practice at that precise moment, among the last exhibitions of his lifetime. He died in 1966, months after returning to Europe.
The surface of the present bronze registers that urgency directly. Every plane bears the trace of the artist’s hand, every gouge and accretion of bronzes preserving the immediacy of touch. Where La Clairière places the human figure in relation to space and to others, Buste d'homme (New York I) distills the encounter to its most irreducible terms: one face, endlessly examined, never resolved.
Mark Rothko
Untitled
Executed circa 1959 Est. $5–7 million
Executed circa 1959, at the height of Rothko's most fully realized decade, this oil on paper mounted on canvas work belongs to a body of paintings that critic Bonnie Clearwater once described as sometimes feeling more quintessentially Rothko than his painted canvases; their intimacy of scale producing a quality of attention that his monumental works approach differently. Its layered fields of jewel tones and amber are applied through the same nuanced feathering technique that defined his large-scale practice, dissolving hard edges into luminous, hovering zones of color that reward close and sustained looking.
The work sits at a pivotal moment in Rothko's career. In 1958 he had accepted the commission for the Seagram Murals, a body of work that would mark a shift from his saturated, luminous palette toward deeper, more somber tones. This painting captures the transition, its warmth and chromatic richness carrying the resonance of what was already becoming a more searching and interior vision. It was acquired by David Wingate at Sotheby's Parke Bernet in London in 1976, remaining in the collection for fifty years. It was later included in the first exhibition dedicated to Rothko's paintings on paper, the landmark 1984 to 1986 traveling show that originated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and toured major American institutions including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Wassily Kandinsky
Zwei schwarze Streifen (Two Black Stripes)
Executed in 1930 Est. $2–3 million
The year 1930 was one of the most consequential of Kandinsky's career. That January, a major retrospective of his work was held at the Staatliches Museum in Saarbrücken, and art historian Will Grohmann published the first serious monograph devoted to the artist, cementing his place in the canon of modernism. It was against this backdrop that Zwei schwarze Streifen (Two Black Stripes) was painted, a work that stands as one of the most luminous expressions of everything Kandinsky had been working toward.
The canvas belongs to the final, most refined phase of his years at the Bauhaus, the legendary school founded by Walter Gropius around the unifying principles of art, design and their collective social power. Kandinsky had joined the faculty in 1921, and by 1930 was working in Dessau, where the school had relocated under Nazi pressure in 1925. His theoretical treatise Point and Line to Plane, published just a few years earlier, had sought to articulate the intrinsic forces of pictorial elements — shapes, lines, color, pattern — and Zwei schwarze Streifen reads as a luminous demonstration of those ideas in practice. In keeping with the Bauhaus spirit of material experimentation, Kandinsky incorporated Ripolin, an enamel paint, alongside traditional oil, the resulting surface playing thin, glossy passages against more matte expanses in a way that rewards close looking.
The painting is part of a suite of similarly formatted canvases from 1930, works from which are held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Musée d'arts de Nantes, among others, and has been widely exhibited since its creation across Europe, Japan and New York.
Varvara Stepanova Two Figures Executed in 1921 Est. $1.2–1.8 million
Among the most historically significant works in the collection, Two Figures belongs to a series of 38 paintings Varvara Stepanova executed between 1919 and 1921, during a period of intense creative ferment that followed the Russian Revolution. Working at the intersection of art and ideology, Stepanova used this body of work to explore the movement of the human body through an entirely geometric visual language, constructing figures from interlocking angular forms that suggest motion rather than describe it. The series anticipated the design work for which she would become equally celebrated, as the ideas she developed in paint found their natural extension in the geometric textile and fashion designs she produced in the early 1920s.
Works from the series were included in the landmark 1921 Moscow exhibition 5x5=25, widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the development of Construcivism, alongside works by Alexander Rodchenko, Stepanova's husband and close collaborator, Lyubov Popova, Alexandra Exter and Alexander Vesnin.
The painting's provenance is as remarkable as its art-historical pedigree. Retained by the artist's family for nearly seven decades, it was offered at Sotheby's groundbreaking 1988 auction of Russian Avant-Garde and Contemporary Soviet Art in Moscow, the only international auction ever to have taken place on Soviet soil, where it was acquired by the Wingates. Only one other oil painting by Stepanova has appeared at auction since, when Sotheby's offered Figure with Guitar, no. 3 from the same series in London in June 2014, where it achieved £1,650,500.
Tiffany Studios "Wisteria" Table Lamp Executed circa 1905 Est. $600,000–800,000
Among the most celebrated designs ever to emerge from Tiffany Studios, the "Wisteria" lamp occupies a singular place in the history of American decorative arts. Conceived in 1901 by Clara Driscoll, head of the Women's Glass Cutters Department, it received immediate critical recognition and quickly became one of the most expensive models in Tiffany's entire line, listed at $400 within five years of its introduction. Today it is widely regarded as an icon of American design and one of the great achievements in leaded glass of any era.
Louis Comfort Tiffany's fascination with the wisteria ran deep. An avid collector of Asian art and craft, he was well aware of the plant's symbolism in Japanese culture, where it signified long life, love and tenderness. His devotion to the vine was literal as well as artistic: at Laurelton Hall, his Long Island estate, he planned for wisteria to cascade across large sections of the structure itself. That personal affinity translated directly into one of his most technically demanding designs. Each Wisteria lamp is composed of nearly 2,000 individually cut glass tiles, selected with painstaking care for color, pattern and translucency to create the illusion of cascading blossoms. Despite being a standardized model, no two are alike.
The present example is an early and exceptional one. Its shade presents a deeply saturated, nuanced palette ranging from cobalt and indigo to lavender, with vibrant green and aquamarine striations throughout, and an unusual warm amber and orange tonality along the upper shoulder that distinguishes it from others of the model. That the lamp now enters the market within the context of a Modern Evening sale is itself a milestone: while Sotheby's made history presenting Tiffany Studios in a marquee fine art context with the landmark Danner Memorial Window in 2024, a Wisteria lamp has never before been offered in a Modern Evening sale. Sotheby's holds the auction record for Tiffany Studios overall, the top five leaded glass lamp prices achieved at auction over the past five years, and the records for three distinct Wisteria lamp variants, among them the Wisteria-Laburnum, the Pony Wisteria and the standard Wisteria Table Lamp. For the Wingates, who saw no meaningful boundary between art and the objects that furnished a life, the lamp's presence in this sale is a natural extension of the collection's character and of a lifelong conviction that beauty, in whatever form it takes, deserves to be lived with.
Roy Lichtenstein Entablature Executed in 1974
Est. $600,000–800,000
Roy Lichtenstein
Still Life with Coffee Pot and Flower Pot (Study)
Executed in 1973
Est. $600,000–800,000
Few series in Lichtenstein's career reveal his art historical wit quite as sharply as the Entablatures, developed between 1971 and 1976. Turning his attention to the neoclassical architectural ornament that lined Manhattan's facades, Lichtenstein subjected the decorative friezes and cornices of American buildings to the same Pop treatment he had applied to comic panels and consumer goods, arriving at works that are at once formally rigorous and quietly subversive. As the artist himself explained, "The Entablatures represent my response to minimalism and the art of Donald Judd and Kenneth Noland. It's my way of saying that the Greeks did repeated motifs very early on, and I am showing, in a humorous way, that Minimalism has a long history." The present canvas, one of only a handful in the series executed in acrylic, graphite and sand on canvas, has been held in the same private collection since 1975 and appears on the market for the first time in fifty years. Its surface is enlivened by an unusual tactile quality: the sand Lichtenstein incorporated was gathered from the Southampton beaches near his Long Island studio, introducing a granular immediacy that quietly contradicts the work's otherwise mechanical precision. Comparable works from the series are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and The Broad, among others.
Alongside the Entablature, the sale also offers Still Life with Coffee Pot and Flower Pot (Study), a 1973 collage in cut painted and printed paper, marker and graphite on board, that demonstrates Lichtenstein working in an altogether different register. Where the Entablature engages the grand sweep of architectural history, the Still Life turns to the domestic and the everyday, subjects Lichtenstein approached with the same transformative intelligence he brought to every corner of visual culture.
Kenneth Noland
Tab
Executed in 1962
Est. $400,000–600,000
By 1962, Kenneth Noland had arrived at one of the most concentrated and assured moments of his career, two years before he would represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Tab belongs to his celebrated Target series, in which concentric circles of thinned pigment were allowed to soak slowly into unprimed canvas, fusing color directly with the fabric support and achieving a luminous flatness that no amount of conventional brushwork could replicate. Four rings of orange, moss green, yellow and powder blue radiate from the center of the composition, suspended against a field of soft cobalt blue, their edges feathering gently outward in what curator Diane Waldman described as a union where "the rational and the felt, distilled form and sensuous color intermesh to create a magic presence."
Noland's path to this singular visual language was shaped by an exceptional education. After serving as a pilot and cryptographer in World War II, he attended Black Mountain College, studying under Josef Albers among others, before a pivotal visit to Helen Frankenthaler's studio in 1953 introduced him to the soak-staining technique that would define his practice. The result was a body of work fully liberated from reference and from the visible hand of the artist, color itself becoming the generating force. For the Wingates, who collected Noland alongside Lichtenstein and the Abstract Expressionists, Tab represented the collection's sustained engagement with the most vital currents in postwar American painting.
