What 70 years of collecting art looks like giacometti rothko more in the wingate collection
9 Video Views·May 13, 2026
Great art rarely gives itself away all at once. As the Wingate family discovered over seven decades, the most enduring works are those that ask more questions than they answer—revealing themselves slowly, through time, attention, and lived experience. From early encounters with American modernism to masterworks by Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, and Alberto Giacometti, this collection traces not just a history of art, but a way of seeing—one shaped by curiosity, patience, and a willingness to engage with the unknown.
At home in Old Westbury, paintings, sculpture, and design were placed in constant dialogue—Giacometti bronzes against forest light, luminous canvases beside Tiffany lamps—creating an environment where art was not displayed, but lived with. Sotheby’s is honored to present A New Vista: The David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection, a deeply personal collection shaped across generations.
This May, works from the collection will be offered in the Modern Evening Sale, presented by CELINE, 19 May in New York, as well as numerous other New York and London sales.
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Great art, at least at first, asks more questions than it answers.
When you look at a Kandinsky for the first time, or a Noland, or a Rothko, they open
your mind to new possibilities, new points of view.
From paintings and works on paper, to sculpture and design, the Wingate Collection reflects
a deeply personal engagement with the act of looking, an understanding that great art
reveals itself over time, and that the role of the collector is to keep looking, to keep
discovering.
Sotheby's is honored to present the David and Shoshana Wingate Collection, comprising
over 70 works, spanning seven decades, that together constitute one of the most personal
and wide-ranging private collections to come to auction in recent years.
David and Shoshana Wingate's story began in Israel, and in 1953 they moved with their
children to New York.
Their introduction to the art dealer Edith Halpert, which David described as revealing
a new vista, opened the door to American modernism, and set the foundation for a collection that
would grow steadily over time.
It was interesting going to galleries with my father, because the paintings taught him
how to look at them, and he found it a challenge.
He would be interested in those things that he didn't completely understand, and hope
to once he spent a lot of time with them.
For example, I fell in love with a Liechtenstein entablature.
My father didn't like it as much, but I insisted on us getting it, and then he fell in love
with it once it was hanging in his home.
Because it was clear, clean, and played with the idea of abstraction.
He loved the fact that it was involved in a way with architecture, because it was the
way that certain lines are created in the sides of buildings.
That sensibility finds its most powerful expression in the collection's leading works.
Alberto Giacometti's La Clariere, composition avec neuf figures, stands at the center, a
work that captures the artist's lifelong pursuit of the human presence in space.
One day, clearing his work table, he set the figures on the floor of his studio at random,
and found in their accidental arrangement precisely the composition he'd been searching
for.
The resulting group of nine limit, buried in scale and distributed across a shared rectangular
base, evoked for him the memory of a forest, or a glade, he had once encountered and longed
to paint.
Each tell very different stories, and all feel very comfortable in that little square
of land.
Mark Rothko's Untitled, painted at the height of his most luminous decade in 1959, invites
a different kind of attention.
Its layered fields of color seem to hover and dissolve, drawing the viewer inward.
The longer one looks, the more the painting reveals itself.
It almost feels like dusk.
It's not a landscape, it's a mindscape.
It's one of the most beautiful abstractions in the collection.
One of my favorite pieces in the collection is the Kandinsky.
Kandinsky's Two Black Stripes, painted in the seminal year of 1930, the language of
abstraction reaches a moment of clarity and precision.
Lines, shapes, color come into balance, animated by an internal rhythm that feels both structured
and alive.
Kandinsky transforms the act of seeing into something more intuitive, more immediate,
an encounter that unfolds beyond the visible.
Kandinsky seems to be making things from a microscope made huge.
There's such a beauty about the simplicity and the accuracy of this group of lines.
One of the most abiding principles of the collection was their love of sculpture and
their love of material, bronze in particular, and they showed sculptures by Alberto Giacometti
in proximity to design objects by his brother Diego.
Also, as part of this dialogue between art and design, they had beautiful Tiffany lamps,
and when you think of a Tiffany lamp and you think of their extraordinary bases, sometimes
the root or trunk of a tree, you get that same love of bronze that you see throughout
the collection.
Among the most celebrated design ever to emerge from Tiffany's studios, the Wisteria lamp
occupies a singular place in the history of American decorative arts.
Each Wisteria lamp is composed of nearly 2,000 individually cut glass tiles, selected with
painstaking care for color, pattern, and translucency to create this illusion of cascading blossoms.
But despite being standardized models, no two are alike, and indeed, this is one of
the most beautiful to come to market.
Think what attracted my father to certain works of art were things that he didn't know,
giving him a lot of new information to learn.
But what's interesting is that the collection which began with American modernism as championed
by Edith Halpert was something that stayed with the collection always to this day.
It's not like they moved on to other things, but they built upon that foundation.
It's the story of a lifetime of curiosity and growth.