Sotheby’s to Sell Property from the Collection of Mary Schiller Myers and Louis S. Myers Willem de K Sotheby’s to Sell Property from the Collection of Mary Schiller Myers and Louis S. Myers Willem de Kooning, Large Torso
News-Antique.com - Sep 18,2009 - New York, NY, 11 September 2009 - Beginning this fall, Sotheby’s will offer for sale Property from the Collection of Mary Schiller Myers and Louis S. Myers, noted collectors and arts benefactors from Akron, Ohio. Over a period of 40 years Mrs. Myers, with her husband, assembled a classic collection of Contemporary paintings and sculpture comprising a broad spectrum of American artists as well as an interesting group of European and British artists. Among the highlights are two outstanding
works by Willem de Kooning: a painting from 1977, Untitled XV (est. $5/7 million)* and a sculpture from 1974, Large Torso (est. $4/6 million). Important pieces by Calder, Judd, Mitchell, Neel, Thiebaud, Oldenburg, Noguchi, and others, will also be offered. Approximately twenty works will be included in the Evening Sale on 11 November 2009, with more than fifty being offered the following day. Later this fall, a select group of American and Latin American paintings will be sold, with additional sales in other categories planned for early 2010. Together, works from the Myers’ collection are estimated to bring in the region of $30 million. Highlights to be offered in the Contemporary Art Evening Sale will be shown in Hong Kong in early October and in London during Frieze Week. A special exhibition of nearly the entire group of works from the Myers’ collection will be presented at Sotheby’s in New York from 30 October – 4 November 2009.
Anthony Grant, International Senior Specialist of Contemporary Art said, “The Myers’ collection represents 40 years of collecting in the days before art fairs, websites and digital images, by collectors who lived in a city that has world class museums and burgeoning kunsthalles, but was not a commercial center for international Contemporary art. It was amassed with integrity to the evolutionary process of collecting that was honed not in their backyard but through travel, publications, and correspondence with artists, critics, dealers, galleries and auction houses.” Mary Schiller Myers (1922-2008) and her
husband, Louis S. Myers (1913-1993), made their first significant art purchase in the early 1960s. From there commenced decades-long pursuit of spectacular works of art for their homes as well as a determination to support the arts in Ohio. Mrs. Myers was part a group of forwardlooking women - including Agnes Gund, Nina Castelli Sundell and Marjorie Talalay - that played a significant role in introducing Contemporary art to Ohio in the 1960s. She sat on the board of the Akron Art
Museum for 10 years, and was president for two of them. In the 1970s, she commissioned Claes Oldenburg to create a monumental work of art brought the artist to the city for its installation in 1975.
The spectacular Inverted Q is installed at the museum in Akron and remains a fixture of each visitor’s experience at the institution. In 1997, Mrs. Myers endowed the school of art at the University of Akron, her alma mater, and today the Mary Schiller Myers School of Art has more than 800 enrolled students in
