NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 14 May 2014 in New York will feature three works from the extensive private collection of Los Angeles philanthropists Jane and Marc Nathanson. The highlight of the group is Ocean Park #20 by Richard Diebenkorn, one of the outstanding examples from the artist’s seminal series (est. $9/12 million*, above). The other works to be offered are Four Plates Edges Up by Richard Serra (est. $2.5/3.5 million) and an Untitled Sam Francis painting from 1979 (est. $800,000/1.2 million). Before traveling to Hong Kong and London, the Diebenkorn will be unveiled alongside other spring highlights in Sotheby’s Los Angeles galleries from 26 to 28 March (9200 W Sunset Blvd #170, Los Angeles, CA 90069, 10 am to 4 pm daily).

Over the past several decades, Jane and Marc Nathanson have amassed a substantial collection of Contemporary Art and photography. Equal to their passion for collecting has been their tireless support of cultural institutions in both the greater Los Angeles area as well as Aspen, Colorado. In 2008, the Los Angeles County Museum announced a $10 million gift from the Nathanson for The Jane and Marc Nathanson Gallery of LACMA's Broad Contemporary Art Museum. Jane was a founder and past trustee of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and is a current trustee of LACMA. Marc is also a Trustee of the Aspen Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and the East-West Center. Both the Nathansons are highly accomplished in their respective professional fields; Jane is a psychologist and founder of the Nathanson Family Resilience Center at UCLA's Semel Neuropsychiatric Institute, while Marc is a leading communications executive who served in the Clinton administration as chair of U.S. International Broadcasting.

Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #20 from 1969 was created near the inception of the entire grand cycle of Ocean Park paintings and is an extraordinarily luminous example of the series that represents one of the major triumphs of 20th century abstraction. Diebenkorn moved to Santa Monica in 1966 and was immediately captivated by his surroundings with expanses of beach contrasting sharply with the geometries of nearby streets and buildings. Inspired by the effects of the sunlight on the ocean, the Ocean Park series honors both figuration and abstraction with traces of each co-existing throughout the paintings.

Four Plates Edges Up by Richard Serra is made up of three four-foot square pieces of steel balanced on their three-inch wide edges creating a solid wall that supports, through brilliant engineering and balance, a fourth similarly sized square (est. $2.5/3.5 million). Based on a sculpture created in 1969, this work belongs to the apex of the minimalist movement and is archetypal of Serra’s groundbreaking approach to monumental sculpture.

Untitled, a monumental canvas by Sam Francis, dates from 1979, the pinnacle of a crucial period in the artist’s prodigious career (est. $800,000/1.2 million). Throughout the 1970s Francis’s output was imbued with a surge of forceful creative energy which came alive with a resonance and almost explosive power to create the current blue grid work. Like Jackson Pollock, Francis placed the canvases of works such as Untitled on the floor, often standing at the very center and working his way, freely and openly, out to all four sides. The result is a ceaseless flow of loose, painterly color with repeated crossing and re-crossing of tracks of pigment, which are then interrupted by focusing, stabilizing elements in the form of small square windows of empty space.

“For the nearly 50 years we have been collecting, we have relished every phase of the process - from working directly with artists to the thrill of the hunt at auction,” commented Jane Nathanson. “A collection is a living and breathing being and we are constantly acquiring, reinstalling and refining. At this stage, we have decided to focus a bit more on our holdings of Pop Art as well as continue to expand the breadth of Contemporary artists in our collection. It is our hope that the works we have decided to part with bring their new owners as much pleasure as they have brought us.”