Just months after her death in January at 97, Marian Goodman is returning to the market—this time as a consignor.
Christie’s will offer works from the dealer’s personal collection during its May marquee sales in New York, led by a group of paintings by Gerhard Richter, with one carrying an estimate as high as $50 million. The material, which once hung Goodman’s Manhattan home, is expected to total around $65 million.
The centerpiece is a selection of seven Richter paintings from between 1982 and 2009, presented at the start of the 21st Century Evening Sale on May 20. Among them is the 1982 painting Kerze (Candle), one the artist’s best-known and most sought after motifs; it carries a pre-sale estimate of between $35 million to $50 million.
The group doubles as a record of Goodman’s relationship with Richter, whom she began representing in 1985, when his market in the United States remained underdeveloped. Over the following decades, she placed his work with major institutions while holding back key examples—an approach that helped stabilize prices and shape his reception on both sides of the Atlantic. (Richter made headlines in 2022, when he departed the gallery to join David Zwirner.)
Kerze (Candle), 1982, is estimated at $35 million to $50 million at Christie’s this May.
Courtesy Christie’s Images LTD 2016
That strategy now reads as clairvoyant. Richter’s market has proved durable even as demand for postwar painting has softened at the top end. His 1986 Abstraktes Bild sold for $46.3 million in 2015 at Sotheby’s London, setting a record for a living European artist at the time. Large-scale abstractions from the 1990s also continue to draw high prices when the pop up at auction. Against that backdrop, Goodman’s Richter holdings arrive with both rarity and narrative on its side.
Additional works from the collection will be dispersed across a day sale and an online auction, all sourced from Goodman’s family and excluding artists currently represented by the gallery.
The timing works in Christie’s favor. The market has shown a clear preference for tightly curated, single-owner collections, particularly those tied to figures with institutional weight. Goodman, who opened her gallery in 1977 with a show of Marcel Broodthaers, spent decades building one of the most rigorous programs in contemporary art, backing artists such as Richter, Lothar Baumgarten, Giuseppe Penone, Julie Mehretu, and William Kentridge, the latter of which departed in 2024, with unusual consistency.
Her method was simple and, in the current market, unfashionable: commit early, stay long, and place carefully. Once she took on an artist, she often showed them for decades, resisting the churn that defined much of the last several decades of gallery boom.
What comes to auction in May are the remnants of that discipline. The Richter works, in particular, could be a lesson for dealers and collectors in what to sell, what to keep, and when conviction should outweigh easy money or cache.
