The generational transfer that is reshaping the art world plays out not only at the level of the collector but in the entire group of dealers who are gradually emerging from the scene, with their estate planning strategies and legacies that determine which high-quality goods and artists come to market. Last year’s marquee sale featured an $18.5 million selection from the collection of legendary auctioneer Barbara Gladstone and a $40.4 million trove from auctioneer Daniella Luxembourg. This May, the saga of the dealer’s collection continues with Robert E. Mnuchin’s $130 million-plus collection leading Sotheby’s evening sale, while gallerist Marian Goodman’s personal collection will headline Christie’s Spring Marquee Week. The announcement of the consignment follows the passing of the legendary retailer in January.
“He was a giant at five-foot-two,” Amy Goodman said in a statement remembering her mother. “He had an amazing, deep love and respect for human creation, which is great.” Described by the New York Times as a “quiet guru of art,” Goodman has built a strong international network over the past decades, his gallery’s international reputation growing in tandem with the institutional recognition of the artists he represents.
He was among the first to realize that conceptual art, performance, minimalism and post-minimalist trends could not be sustained through conventional market methods. Instead, they needed a long-term vision, guided by deep trust and a vision that privileged longevity over immediate profit. “One has to be willing to continue showing an artist for fifteen or twenty years,” he once said in a rare interview with art critic Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker in 2004. His relationship with the artists was both deeply personal and based on active support, resulting-as often happens in the gallerist-in a personal collection created by helping to produce, show and support their works.
Foremost among a group of museum-quality works by Gerhard Richter, one of today’s early world stars, to be offered in a private one-owner lot at the start of Marian’s Richters & 21st Century Evening Sale on May 20. Top spot is an early work, photographic, from 1982 Kerze (Candle) (estimate: $35-50 million), with a single burning candle seemingly emerging from within the canvas itself—a modern vanitas and meditation on the transient and transient, further emphasized by Richter’s signature blur.
Christie will also be selling three excellent books from his highly sought-after Abstraktes Bild series, all set in the mid-1990s, when he reached new heights in his interpretation of tone and the radical separation of any sense of stability in the final image. Leading the team is the focus Mohna 1995 work that debuted in the artist’s landmark exhibition “Gerhard Richter: 100 Bilder at the Carré d’Art” in Nîmes in the summer of 1996, before visiting Goodman’s gallery that fall and remaining in his private collection ever since. Other offers in this first phase 18. June 2009oil on chromogenic print-overpainted portrait of Goodman and the artist in the gallery. (Estimates range from $30,000 to $50,000 at the end and from $35 million to $50 million at the end.)
Through frequent travel, Goodman developed close relationships with a new generation of early German artists, including Richter, who was the first to exhibit and sell in New York. He held more than a dozen exhibitions of the artist’s work, representing him from 1985 to 2020, before moving to David Zwirner in late 2022. Goodman’s works come to auction just as Richter is enjoying renewed market momentum, with recent record auction results and strong sales following an extensive survey by the Fondation Paris & Hauser Headlines selling a $23 million work by the artist during a VIP preview.
Three of Richter’s paintings were also among the top spots in London and Hong Kong this past March: Schober (Haybarn) from 1984, one of the artist’s largest landscape paintings, sold for £ 6.9 million on March 5 at Christie’s London, followed by a similar sale for £ 7.6 million for Abstraktes Bild. Later that month, the 1991 red canvas Abstraktes Bild led Christie’s sale in Hong Kong, earning HK$92.1 million ($11.8 million) against an estimate of HK$78-98 million. Richter’s current auction record stands at $46.35 million, set in 2015 by the 1986 Abstracts Bild at Sotheby’s London, which at the time also established the highest price ever achieved for a living European artist. According to the website Artnet, the artist’s total auction sales reached $68 million in 2025—almost 62 percent more than in 2024—while the average sale price increased more than 55 percent year over year to $204,154.
Additional lots from Goodman’s collection will be presented across two other auctions: a dedicated one-owner sequence that opens the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day auction and an online auction, Breaking Ground: The Private Collection of Marian Goodman. Notably, as part of an agreement with the gallery partners and Goodman’s legacy, none of the works included in this sale are by artists currently represented on the gallery’s roster.
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