Works from the artwork assortment of Iowa enterprise chief and philanthropist John Pappajohn and his spouse Mary can be supplied as a gaggle of highlights throughout Christie’s Spring gross sales in New York subsequent month, the public sale home introduced Friday.
The Pappajohns had been a mainstay of ARTnews’s Prime 200 collector listing from 1998 to 2014. John handed away final 12 months on April 26 at 94. Mary, aged 88, died in 2022.
The gathering, which is comprised of works by post-war and modern luminaries together with Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin, and Advert Reinhardt, can be led by Jasper Johns’s 1961 work 0 via 9 (estimate $5 million – $7 million) which debuted that very same 12 months on the artist’s first European present at Galerie Rive Droite in Paris.
Johanna Flaum, Christie’s vice chairman of twentieth and twenty first century artwork, described the Pappajohns’s assortment as “richly reflective of post-war and modern artwork in America” and “finest at school,” and praised the couple, who started amassing artwork within the Sixties, for buying works that on the time “challenged accepted norms and pushed boundaries, proposing new ideas and concepts of what artwork may very well be.”
Additionally notable among the many assortment is Agnes Martin’s acrylic and graphite canvas Untitled #7 from 1996 (estimate $3 million – $5 million) and Bruce Nauman’s sexually charged Hanged Man (1985, estimate $4 million – $6 million).
John and Mary Pappajohn started assortment artwork shortly after they had been married in 1961. Their first buy was a Keith Achepol print that price $50. The Pappajohns would finally amass a set value hundreds of thousands and earn a repute as top-tier collectors and philanthropists who would turn into main donors to the Des Moines Artwork Heart, the College of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, and the College of Iowa.
The John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park, a 4.4-acre, $30 million, public park in downtown Des Moines managed by the Des Moines Artwork Heart is amongst their best philanthropic achievements.
Works from the Pappajohns’s assortment can be supplied all through the Might gross sales together with each the twentieth and the twenty first Century Night gross sales (Might 14 and Might 16, respectively) and the next day gross sales.