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With Western art rising as an ascendant category on the auction block, Christie’s is selling works from the collection of Ted Turner, the media mogul who died earlier this year at 87.
According to CNN, the works are valued at around $20 million. That means the results for Turner’s works are unlikely to near the ones Christie’s achieved earlier this year when it sold a tranche of art about the American West from the holdings of William Koch, who will also part with works by Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne this November. Related Articles RM's SFMOMA Show Changed My Mind About Celebrity Curators Julia Stoschek Collection to Celebrate 20 Years with 'Selfish in Bed' Exhibition and Düsseldorf Reopening
And yet, the Turner collection could prove an unlikely hit, if the Koch sale is any proof. Pegged at $50 million ahead of the sale, the Koch works ended up selling in January for more than $84 million once premiums fees were counted in. According to Christie’s, the Koch sale now holds the record for a single-owner sale of American Western art.
The Turner sale is set to be headlined by an Alfred Bierstadt landscape that long hung above a fireplace in the businessman’s Montana ranch. Titled Yosemite Valley (1866), the painting depicts a placid vision of a tree-lined lake under a blue sky. There are no people here, suggesting that the land was untouched and free for the taking, even though Native Americans resided here.
Turner bought the painting at Sotheby’s in 2003, when the work was given a $6 million high estimate. It was at the time considered one of the most significant Bierstadt works to head to auction in two decades. This time around, the work once again has a $6 million high estimate. Bierstadt’s current auction record, set in 2008, stands at $7.3 million.
Also coming to auction from the Turner collection are two Thomas Moran landscapes depicting the Grand Canyon. The more expensive of the two Moran paintings, titled The Inner Gorge, Grand Canyon, comes to auction with a $6 million high estimate. Moran’s auction record, also set in 2008, is $17.7 million.
“These paintings meant a great deal to our dad, not only because of their beauty, but because they reflected so much of what he loved about nature and the outdoors,” the Turner family said in a statement. “While it’s difficult to part with pieces that were so dear to him, our family takes comfort in knowing they will be appreciated and cherished by others.”
The proceeds from the Christie’s sale will go to the Turner Foundation, whose stated mission is to “protect and restore the natural systems—air, land, and water—on which all life depends.”
“It’s an honor to share this amazing collection with the world,” Tylee Abbott, Christie’s head of American art, said in a statement. “The quality and depth is remarkable, with exceptional paintings by Bierstadt and Moran representing the country’s lasting love of the American landscape. In the context of Mr. Turner’s collection, with the proceeds benefiting his foundation, this takes on even further meaning and will surely resonate with to day’s great interest in the American West.”
American Western art is often considered a fraught genre, since it tends to place settlers, cowboys, and explorers front and center, frequently in a laudatory and admiring way. The genre has looked especially fraught this year, on the 250th anniversary of the United States, as institutions across the nation revisited American history, sometimes with a critical eye.
But any scrutiny over Western art’s themes and images seems not to have impacted sales.
“There has long been a very committed group collecting Western art, many of them based in the West,” Abbott told ARTnews earlier this year. “In the last couple of decades there has been an upswell of interest in American art through a combination of bidders based in the West and coastal clients acquiring homes in the West.”