Betty Freeman auction includes Hockney, Warhol
NEW YORK -- Arts patron Betty Freeman was anything but a Beverly Hills housewife.
An early financial backer of composers like John Adams and Phillip Glass, she also collected the works of artists including David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Dan Flavin and Andy Warhol.
Four months after her death at age 87, Freeman's estate is selling 19 of the contemporary paintings in her collection. They will be auctioned at Christie's on May 13, after going on display at the auction house's Rockefeller Center galleries starting Friday.
The star of the collection is Hockney's painting, "Beverly Hills Housewife," which depicts a 1960s-era housewife -- Freeman herself -- in a pink dress on the patio of her home. Measuring 12 feet (3.66 meters) long and 6 feet (1.83 meters) high, it is estimated to bring between $7 million and $10 million.
Christie's predicts it could break the world auction record for a work by Hockney. The current Hockney record is $5.4 million for "The Splash" sold at Sotheby's in 2006.
All 19 lots could bring a total of $26 million to $40 million.
Christie's is hoping that the single-owner sale will create the same kind of stir as its February auction of art works belonging to legendary designer Yves Saint Laurent.
That sale, in Paris, brought a total of nearly $500 million for 658 lots, defying indicators of a softening art market.
At last fall's auction sales, many lots went unsold or fetched prices way below their estimates.
"Betty Freeman rarely lent works in the collection, so it presents a unique opportunity to see this highly personal and extraordinary vision," said Laura Paulson, deputy chairman of Christie's Americas.
The auction house said all the works are being sold by the estate for inheritance and estate tax reasons.
"Beverly Hills Housewife" was painted between 1966-67 shortly after the British artist arrived in Los Angeles.
Freeman had admired Hockney's work after seeing his solo exhibit in London in 1963. Shortly after Freeman arrived in Los Angeles he contacted Freeman about painting the swimming pool in her backyard for his "California Dreaming" series.
But he decided to focus on Freeman instead because he found that like many Los Angeles residents she "was very much a function of the space that she existed in" and conversely the space was a function of her, Christie's said.
Over four decades, Freeman commissioned works from about 80 composers and underwrote performances and recordings. An accomplished photographer, she took pictures of the composers and musicians she supported, and those images have been displayed at Carnegie Hall.
Freeman, whose second husband was painter and sculptor Franco Assetto, backed artists who might be too avant-garde to win art committee or government grants. Her taste frequently ran to minimalism and dissonance.
In 1964, Freeman met eccentric American composer Harry Partch, who was living in his car. Partch invented a 43-tone musical scale and a variety of instruments to play his compositions. Freeman got him a house and a studio and supported him for a decade until his death in 1974.
In the 1980s and '90s, she hosted musical salons in her Beverly Hills home for emerging composers, including Steve Reich, Luciano Berio and Terry Riley.
Adams' opera "Nixon in China" was dedicated to Freeman.