Bonhams’s auctions of objects from the collection of Barbara Walters brought in $5 million. Ninety-nine percent of the 135 objects offered at an in-person sale sold, while all of the 238 lots made available online found buyers.

The estate toured Boston, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and Hong Kong before the sale, before landing in New York alongside an exhibition commemorating her career. Art, jewelry, design, and personal objects were among the items made available for auction.

Presented at Bonhams, her collection was spread across two sales: a live one held on November 6 and an online one where bidding began on October 29 and ran through November 7.

Walters had amassed a collection of American art, much of it in the form of paintings depicting women set against idyllic backdrops. Among the works from it that headed to auction, Childe Hassam’s The Peony Girl (ca. 1888–89) fetched $622,800 and William Merritt Chase’s The Tenth Street Studio (ca. 1884–1915) sold for $508,500. The former was Walters’s favorite piece, while the latter hung in her living room.

From her Mario Buatta–decorated apartment, where Walters often hosted dinner parties, a set of chintz upholstered armchairs by the designer yielded $4,480; a pair of gilt metal ostrich-form candlesticks sold for $6,400; against an estimate of $800–$1,200, Baccarat glass stemware service fetched $5,760; and a Royal Crown Derby Imari porcelain dinner service exceeded its estimate of $800–$1,200, selling for $5,760.

A lawsuit filed yesterday in New York State’s Supreme Court reveals blistering criticisms against the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s board member by one of their own. 

Fredrick Iseman, Frankenthaler’s nephew who for 20 years was sat on the Foundation’s board with Clifford Ross, also the artist’s nephew, her stepdaughter, Lise Motherwell, and board’s director Michael Hecht, claims his family members are taking advantage of the artist’s legacy in what was colorfully described as “grabstract expressionism” that could effectively destroy Frankenthaler’s legacy. 

Iseman, who claims to have been hand-picked by Frankenthaler to preserve her legacy by helping organize exhibitions of her work at major institutions alongside” other artists of major importance,” says his family members exploit the Foundation “to advance their own personal interests and careers” which he sees as a “betrayal of their commitment to safeguard, protect, and promote Frankenthaler’s legacy.”

The slights against Frankenthaler’s name listed in the suit range from the tactless to the potentially devastating. Ross, who is an artist himself, is accused of engaging in shady “pay-to-play” deals, “trading the Foundation’s grant-giving capacity in exchange for exhibitions of his own otherwise unremarkable artwork and to generate publicity for his own career.” Motherwell, the suit says, used her position on the board to curate Frankenthaler exhibitions in small town museums that lack the prestige befitting an artist of Frankenthaler’s caliber “despite her complete lack of appropriate credentials.”

Hecht, too, is guilty of tarnishing Frankenthaler’s legacy, according to the suit, which says the director enriches himself by regularly employing his own accounting firms for Foundation business and facilitating donations from the Foundation to “unrelated institutions where he sits on the board.”

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With a mixture of pride of loss we release the Contemporary Art Quarterly archive of the late Lin May Saeed. We encourage you to spend some time with her exhibitions, a collection which is both impressive for a young artist and tragic in its brevity. For the first time, we’ve produced an archive documenting an artist that we’ve followed and admired from the beginning of her career, and we hope that you recognize some of the many shows in her archive that were published here on Daily. Our deep gratitude goes out to Jacky Strenz, whose help was invaluable throughout the process of creating this archive.

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