03/13/2026
Design matters.
On April 22, approximately 125 works from the celebrated Jean and Terry de Gunzburg Collection will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s New York, marking one of the most valuable single-owner design auctions in the house’s history, a true once-in-a-generation moment. The sale brings together design and art by icons including Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, Jean Royère, Alberto Giacometti, Jean-Michel Frank, and Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, alongside masterpieces by Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, and Pablo Picasso.
Assembled over more than four decades, the collection reflects the couple’s instinctive approach to collecting, shaped within their New York apartment designed by Jacques Grange and often described as ‘New York on the outside, Paris on the inside.’ Blending avant-garde design with modern and contemporary art, the interiors reveal a rare dialogue between objects, where furniture, sculpture coexist in unexpected harmony.
A few of our obsessions:
Francis Bacon’s 1979 triptych Studies from the Human Body, a monumental work that anchors the dining room and embodies the collection’s remarkable provenance and vision. The dining chairs are by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann (c. 1930s) and the rug is by Ivan de Silva Bruhns (also c. 1930s).
Serge Poliakoff’s ‘Composition, Blue, Red, and Grey’ (1955 hangs above the living room fireplace alongside Georg Baselitz’s ‘Dresdner Frauen: Die Kranke aus Radebeul’ (1990) and Beauford Delaney’s ‘Still Life with Idol’ (c. 1945).
Pablo Picasso’s ‘Buste de Femme’ (1955) hangs above a four-panel screen by Alexandre Noll (1925). On the left shelves, a group of ceramics by Picasso and ceramics by Tatsuzo Shimaok, placed with armchairs by Paul Dupré-Lafon.
Photographed by François Halard in 2014 for W Magazine.
