The Miller Collection at Christie's Christie’s is delighted to announce the consignment from the Collection of
J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller to its 2008 season of sales at Christie’s in London and New York.
arts were among the most civilizing influences of life. With an
unerring eye for color and design, she identified and bought the works of some of the greatest artists
of the 20th century well before they were famous. She, with her husband, commissioned major
works by Henry Moore, Jean Tinguely, and Dale Chihuly for public projects in their hometown and
donated them to the city. She chaired the Indiana Arts Commission and was the first person to
chair the board of the Indiana Endowment for the Arts. It was her vision and persistence that
created the Indianapolis Museum of Art—Columbus Gallery, one of the first branch galleries of
a major museum in the country.
Educated at Yale and Balliol College, Oxford in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Irwin Miller was an
active participant in the intellectual debates at both universities on modernism and the role of art in
society. He returned to his hometown of Columbus, Indiana in 1934, to enter the world of business
as the General Manager of Cummins Engine Company. Over the next sixty years, Irwin Miller
fashioned Cummins into the leading independent diesel manufacturer in the world, a Fortune 500
company with 25,000 employees in 131 countries and $6 billion of sales, based on the simple belief
that the only appropriate goal in any activity is the very best possible.
Xenia Miller was also born in southern Indiana. Like many women who came of age in the Great
Depression, she could not afford to go to college. She met her future husband across a union
bargaining table at Cummins when she represented the office workers and he negotiated for
management. Her discerning eye for great art, grounded in her love of beauty and color, was largely
self taught in the great museums and galleries of the world.
The Millers’ shared faith in art as an
essential element of a good life went
beyond civic improvement. The Millers
persuaded their friend Eero Saarinen (who
was rarely interested in residential
architecture) to design a house for their
family in Columbus, finished in 1957. It
was for this wonderful structure and for
the glorious gardens, that the Millers, over an eighteen year period in the 1960s and 70s, carefully
selected paintings, drawings and sculptures by late 19th and 20th century masters.
International Auction Calendar
Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale
London, June 24
Led by Claude Monet’s Le bassin aux nymphéas, an
expansive and important late water-lily painting, one of a
series of four paintings signed and dated by the artist in
1919 (estimate on request), other major Impressionist
and Modern works to be offered on the evening include
paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Camille
Pissarro, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Wassily
Kandinsky.
Post-War and Contemporary Art
London, June 30, July 1
Three paintings will be auctioned, led by Mark Rothko’s Black, White and Blue (estimate: £1,500,000-
2,000,000).
American Furniture and Folk Art
New York, September 24
A superb example from one of the most sought-after American
