The Phillips auction house in New York, which recently appointed Vanessa Hallett, its worldwide head of photographs, to deputy chairman, Americas, has landed its most valuable photography collection consignment in its history: around 470 photographs, estimated at $10m, from the collection of the photography and arts education non-profit, the Joy of Giving Something foundation (JGS).
The material comes from American financier Howard Stein, who began collecting photographs in the 1980s and eventually amassed one of the world’s largest private collections in the medium; he endowed his non-profit, JGS, with more than 10,000 exemplars from the 1840s to the 21st century. A two-part sale of 175 photographs from the foundation set a record of $21.3m with premium (est. $13-20m) at Sotheby's New York in December 2014. Phillips is the only house to offer photographs from the collection this season, a spokeswoman confirms.
Phillips plans to sell the JGS works this year in a series of three auctions—an evening auction scheduled for 3 April and two day auctions scheduled for 4 April and 3 October—under the banner The Odyssey of Collecting: Property from Joy of Giving Something Foundation. Highlights include the László Moholy-Nagy diptych Goerz (Positive and Negative) (1925; est. $150,000-$250,000), Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia blossom (1925; est. $180,000-$220,000) and Alfred Stieglitz’s The Terminal, New York (1893; est. $120,000-$180,000), as well as 19th-century albumen prints by the American photographer Carleton Watkins and a Eugène Atget photograph once owned by the Dadaist artist Tristan Tzara.
Two sets of collection highlights will go on tour around mid-February—one set will travel to Paris and London, while the other will head west to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Exact dates and venues have yet to be confirmed. The highlights will be re-united in a show at Phillips in New York, from 27 March to 3 April, just before the first auction.