Updated April 26, 2026 — Christie’s New York
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Christie’s has confirmed the structure of Breaking Ground: The Private Collection of Marian Goodman, a three-part sale series valued at roughly $65 million that will headline New York’s May marquee week. The lead lots — seven Gerhard Richter paintings drawn from between 1982 and 2009 — will open the 21st Century Evening Sale on May 20. The 1982 painting Kerze (Candle) carries a pre-sale estimate of $35-50 million, the highest single estimate in the cycle.
That estimate alone reframes the read on this auction season. Coming off the U.S. art market’s 23 percent rebound to $3.17 billion in 2025 — Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips combined — and on the back of Sotheby’s London evening sale at $175 million earlier this month, the May cycle now has a single-collection anchor large enough to set the tone for the entire two-week run.
What’s actually in the room
The collection is being structured as three discrete events: the seven Richters opening the 21st Century Evening Sale on May 20, a single-owner day sale on May 21 with the lower-priced material, and a single-owner online sale running May 8 through May 22 carrying works from Goodman’s earlier Multiples platform — Baldessari, Warhol, Flavin, Artschwager.
The estimate range across the full collection is $30,000 to $50 million. That spread matters. Christie’s is putting the entire dealer’s archive into the market at one window, which gives the house a complete cross-section of secondary demand from the very top of the contemporary market down through editioned work — the same span Goodman built her gallery around for half a century.
The Richter group is the read-through. Kerze at $35-50 million sets the ceiling. Poppy, a 1995 multicolored abstract, carries an estimate around $15 million. The remaining five paintings sit between those marks. If the Evening Sale lands inside the Kerze estimate band, the seven-painting Richter group alone clears more than half the cycle’s $65 million target.
Why dealer estates keep landing the headline slot
This is the second consecutive May cycle headlined by a dealer-estate consignment. The supply is structural. Gallery founders who built the secondary market in the 1970s and 1980s are aging out, and their personal collections — assembled with first-look access at studio prices over four-decade careers — are now coming to market at a rate auction houses haven’t seen since the original wave of Manhattan estate transitions in the 1990s.
Goodman, who died in October 2023 at 96, ran one of the most disciplined contemporary programs in the world, with artists including Richter, William Kentridge, John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers and Maurizio Cattelan on long-term gallery rosters. The collection on offer is her personal holdings, not gallery inventory — meaning every work cleared a private acquisition decision, not a sales conversation.
What collectors should pre-position around
For asset-backed lenders and private collectors evaluating the May cycle, three data points carry through from this lineup. First, the Richter ceiling — if Kerze hammers above $40 million, every Richter held in private hands gains comparables math overnight. Second, the Multiples online sale gives a clean print on edition values for blue-chip 1960s-1980s names; thin secondary trading in those works has made fair-value benchmarking difficult for years. Third, the dealer-estate playbook is now entrenched as the May headline structure, which suggests next spring’s calendar will follow the same template.
Christie’s previews open at the Rockefeller Center galleries May 4 and run through May 18. The 21st Century Evening Sale is May 20, with the day sale May 21 and the Multiples online closing May 22.
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A Candle Still Burning After Forty Years
Stand in front of a Richter and the first thing you feel is a kind of hush. The surface is soft and then suddenly not. A flame, a blur, a trace of something just passed. You step closer, then back, and the painting rearranges itself as you do.
That is the pleasure of owning, or even briefly standing near, work like this. It never gives itself up in one look. It changes with the light, the hour and your own mood, and it rewards the kind of attention that most of modern life does not ask for.
A sale like this one is a reminder of why. Buyers gather because a work of this kind holds attention in a way few things do. For anyone who owns a serious piece, the room’s excitement is a quiet affirmation and nothing more. Your painting is what it was yesterday, and it will be what it is tomorrow, whatever any evening decides.
When capital is needed and the work is not for sale, Borro can lend against fine art of the right caliber. The piece is held in secure, fully insured safekeeping, you remain its owner, and when you repay it returns to you. See how it works for fine art, and let the candle keep burning on your wall.
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