Perhaps you groggily walked with a post-Halloween night cup of coffee down to Chestnut and 18th street yesterday to take advantage of an art-liquidation sale: Freeman’s auctioning off the first part of the Lehman Bros. print collection. Among the works that sold were I Love Liberty (pictured), a 1982 print of the Statue of Liberty by Roy Lichtenstein (original estimate: $15,000-$25,000, sold for $49,000), Polygons, a 1975 primary-colored set of seven Robert Indiana prints (estimated at $6,000, the set went for $23,750). Other big-name artists in the collection were Louise Bourgeois and Robert Rauschenberg. All 283 works of art sold for a total of $135 million, (editor’s correction: 1.35 million. If only the un-decimal amount were true for Lehman’s creditors) nearly double the original estimate for this part of the collection ($760,800). This is still nowhere near the amount that Lehman owes creditors, which is somewhere around $250 billion. Lehman filed the biggest U.S. bankruptcy ever on Sept. 15, 2008.

$135 million is certainly not a small sum, but considering the amount of art, the pieces were relatively cheap. The reason? They’re prints. “This is decoration — what you get when you have a lot of offices you want to fill up,” says New York gallery owner Mark Borghi.

Freeman’s will be selling the next part of the Lehman’s collection in their “Fine American and European Paintings and Sculpture” on December 6th, 2009, with the last items of the Collection being sold at a ‘no reserve sale’ at “Works from the Lehman Brothers Collection: Part II” on February 12th, 2010. You can place your bid on the Freeman’s website. Perhaps the final sale will include things like Dick Fuld’s doodles and some break room motivation posters.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 2:45 pm.