Collection, with a select group of nine exquisite highlights kicking off the Spring Marquee Week 20th Century Evening Sale live at Rockefeller Center. The group is comprised of exemplary works by Ed Ruscha, three Philip Guston masterpieces, and outstanding examples by twentieth century artistic luminaries: Man Ray, Henri Matisse, and Ken Price. Additional works from the collection will be offered in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale. In total, the collection is expected to achieve in excess of $50,000,000.

The collection is led by Ed Ruscha’s Burning Standard (estimate: $20,000,000 – 30,000,000), a painting that is considered to be one of the most historically important works in the artist’s oeuvre. Painted in 1968, Burning Standard is one of only five Standard Station paintings from the 1960s, and one of two paintings to feature the fire motif. This singular and groundbreaking painting is now considered an icon of twentieth-century post-war art, on par with Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Lichtenstein’s comic-book heroines. This May will be only the second time in history that a Standard Station painting has come to auction—the first was in a Christie’s New York Evening Sale in November 2007 when the lot surpassed its high estimate to sell for $6,985,000 and set a new record for the artist at the time. The present example will be sold in the Evening Sale alongside two additional works by the contemporary icon, Do You Think She Has It (estimate: $1,500,000 – 2,000,000) and Business #1 (estimate: $250,000 – 350,000). An additional eight examples by Ruscha from the collection will be featured in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale. This offering presents collectors with a unique opportunity to acquire the finest examples of Ruscha ahead of his highly anticipated retrospective touring to MoMA and LACMA beginning this fall.

Three iconic Guston paintings from the collection will be another highlight of the Evening Sale, led by Chair (estimate: $12,000,000 – 18,000,000) which was last seen by the public during MoMA’s seminal High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture exhibition in 1991. Among his most important figurative paintings, comparable works to Chair are held in institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Gallery, London, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. The other two Gustons in the Collection, Pull (estimate: $6,000,000-8,000,000) and Bricks (estimate: $6,000,000-8,000,000) are similarly fresh to market and have not been seen by the public for more than two decades. The sale of this group will coincide with the National Gallery of Art’s Washington DC leg of the Guston retrospective, which will be on view through August 2023.

The collection is a narrative of five key artists who Dorothy and Alan Press held dear to their hearts. Built during the 1990s, it is essentially a set of retrospectives in miniature, delving into different themes, techniques, and subjects, and uniting important masterpieces with rarely seen jewels. As a whole, it is ultimately a study of true connoisseurship, demonstrating an intimate engagement and embrace of artists’ work across various time periods and media.

Ana Maria Celis, Head of Department, Post-War and Contemporary Art remarks, “Alan and Dorothy Press were among a rarefied group of connoisseur collectors who had a true and deep appreciation for a select group of artists. They collected zealously, across media and periods, supporting the markets of the artists they championed long before they came to achieve the global level of recognition in the market today. The superb quality of the works throughout the entire collection is illustrative of the Press’s keen collecting vision. Their high level of taste is present in the unmatched quality of each individual object—and only becomes amplified when the works are viewed collectively. At Christie’s we are truly grateful to steward the finest collections through generations. It is a thrill to have the opportunity this Spring to present this singular group of objects assembled by the inimitable Alan and Dorothy Press.”

Alan Press was an extremely successful commodities trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and his deep love for trading carried over into his art collecting. His interest in art likely began during his time in the army while stationed in Germany in the 1950s. He and Dorothy met in 1968, married in 1970, and soon after began to collect German Expressionist works—mainly prints and woodcuts of Munch and Kirchner. Through the 1970s they traveled frequently to Switzerland and Germany and eventually accumulated one of the leading US-based collections of these artists. Near the same time, they started collecting H.C. Westermann, eventually growing what would become one of the deepest collections of the artist in existence.

In the mid-to-late 1980s the couple sold their entire collection of German Expressionist art and transitioned into buying modern and contemporary in depth, with a keen focus on Ed Ruscha, Philip Guston, Ken Price, and Henri Matisse. The couple generously lent artworks to museums and galleries worldwide, and avidly supported their local art institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Smart Museum on the campus of the University of Chicago, developing close relationships with curators that would last throughout their lives.