Over two generations, six decades and thousands of titles, the father-and-son co-founders of Abbeville Press, Harry and Robert Abrams, pushed the art book to new heights. They also amassed a world-class collection of 20th-century art along the way. Now many of their works are set to hit the auction block for the first time at Sotheby’s in New York.
On 27 September the auction house will host a dedicated live sale of standouts from the family’s holdings, featuring works by artists ranging from Christo, Alexander Calder and Jean Dubuffet to Isamu Noguchi, Marisol and Bob Thompson. An online sale delving deeper into their collection will be staged the same week. Altogether, Sotheby’s estimates that the works in the live and online auctions will make between $11m and $16m.
Harry N. Abrams had been slowly furnishing his home with art for years before he founded an eponymous publishing house—the first in the US to specialise in art books—in 1949. But by the time he sold that company (which continues today as Abrams Books) in 1966, even mainstream America knew him as a major collector. A profile in Life magazine the previous year showed the publisher lounging among pieces by Tom Wesselmann, Gerald Laing and George Segal, while a 1970 Auction magazine cover story noted his savvy purchases of works by Jim Dine, David Hockney and Wayne Thiebaud. That Abrams was enamoured of Pop art made sense: a former ad man, he had distinguished himself from his publishing peers with a keen knack for branding.
Harry N. Abrams (left) and his son Robert (right) were close to many of the artists whose work they collected
Courtesy Cynthia Vance-Abrams and Sotheby’s
Extending artists’ voices through books
In 1977 Harry partnered with his son Robert E. Abrams to launch a new publishing house for art books called Abbeville Press. When Harry died two years later, Robert took over. He remained atop the company in various roles until his own death, at age 80, in 2023—a tenure marked by the same commitments to craft, quality and artistic integrity that his father preached. “It mattered so much to Bob and his father that they find a way to extend the voice of artists … through these books,” Cynthia Vance-Abrams, Robert’s widow, tells The Art Newspaper.
Ahead of the auction, Vance-Abrams and other members of the Abrams clan began narrowing down a subset of nearly 100 works that, according to Sotheby’s senior specialist Nicole Schloss, “really spoke to Harry and Bob’s collecting philosophies”. Pieces by Allan D’Arcangelo, Robert Indiana and Mel Ramos reflect the Abramses’ shared love of Pop art, while works by Mary Bauermeister, Georges Mathieu and Jesús Rafael Soto bespeak their mutual interest in form-pushing art from beyond North America.
Headliner
Headlining the live sale is Study for Energy Void, a torqued stone sculpture made in 1971 by Noguchi. Although the artist, who once said that he “carried this concept of the void like a weight on [his] shoulders”, created three sculptures bearing this trapezoidal form, the Abramses’ version, purchased directly from Noguchi in 1979, is the only one made of marble. The piece held pride of place in the middle of the “art barn”, an enclave in upstate New York inspired by Philip Johnson’s Glass House that Vance-Abrams custom-designed with Robert in the 2000s to showcase the family’s treasured books and works of art, many of which were passed down from Harry. Study for Energy Void is “one of the best—if not the best—Isamu Noguchi marbles to ever come to auction”, Schloss says. Sotheby’s expects it to sell for between $3m and $5m.
Other highlights of the auction include Alex Katz’s 1974 portrait Joan, estimated to fetch $1.5m to $2m; Fernando Botero’s 1977 painting El Cardenal, with a $700,000 to $1m target range; and Bob Thompson’s panoramic Nativity Scene (around 1964), which starred in the late artist’s travelling survey exhibition from 2021 until 2023 and could now bring between $500,000 and $700,000.
Sculptures by two other recent museum exhibition subjects, the mononymous post-war artists Marisol and Chryssa, come with humbler presale targets but greater potential for bidding fireworks. Of Marisol’s dual-figure The Bicycle Race (1962-63), which was featured in the 1965 Life article on Harry Abrams, Schloss says “we expect and hope that it will be somewhat of a record-setter” at its $250,000 to $350,000 estimate. “And the same thing can be said about Chryssa,” she adds, referring to the Greek American sculptor’s neon-in-Plexiglas work The Automat (1971-72), tagged to sell for between $150,000 and $200,000. (The top auction results for the two artists are $912,000 for Marisol’s The Cocktail Party, sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 2005, and around $331,000 for Chryssa’s Les portes de Times Square, New York, sold at Bonhams in Paris in 2022.)
‘Talking with artists was Bob’s happy place’
Chryssa, who maintained a long relationship with the Abramses, was no doubt an occasional guest at the lively dinner parties that both Harry and Robert loved to organise with the artists whose work they collected or published. Vance-Abrams recalls chatty meals with Richard Lindner, Larry Poons and Lina Iris Viktor, as well as the time she and her husband volleyed thoughts about “art and fear with Larry Bell over ramen”. In work and leisure, “talking with artists was Bob’s happy place”, she adds.
It was a love he came by honestly, as evidenced by another memorable meal in family lore. After lunch with Harry at the Abramses’ Manhattan home sometime in the early 1960s, Andy Warhol invited Robert and his brother Michael, just teenagers then, on an arty adventure to Times Square. There, Warhol spotted a photobooth and directed the young men inside as he fed it $5 worth of quarters. The last coin yielded a particularly striking picture of the brothers—one facing forward, the other in profile—that Warhol turned into a trio of silkscreen portraits for Harry.
The gems that remain I view as the seeds for the next chapter
These works, which the Abramses still own, were never considered for consignment to Sotheby’s, nor were many other pieces in the family’s holdings. Vance-Abrams declined to share the exact scale of the collection but indicated it is many times the size of the selection coming to auction. “There are gems that do remain, of course. I view them as the seeds for the next chapter,” she says. For her, collecting is a “living, breathing process. It’s a legacy that continues on, as does the publishing”.
The significance of this legacy is not lost on the widow. “I think the Abrams family collection is an incredible story,” she says. “It’s an American story. And it’s a love story.”