May 16, 2022
A $922 Million Divorce: The Macklowe Collection
Ordered sold in a bitter divorce, the Macklowe collection became the most valuable single-owner collection ever auctioned, totalling $922 million in 2021–22.
When New York real-estate mogul Harry Macklowe and his wife Linda divorced, a court ordered their art collection sold and the proceeds split. The result, auctioned at Sotheby's across 2021 and 2022, was extraordinary.
Masterworks by Rothko, Giacometti, Warhol, Pollock and Twombly went under the hammer, and the two-part sale totalled around $922 million — the highest ever for a single-owner collection at the time.
It was a strange spectacle: decades of shared passion dispersed to the world's wealthiest bidders, the bitter end of a marriage written in record-breaking prices.
Image: “Sotheby's (51921999492)” — ajay_suresh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.