The Theodore and Ruth Baum Collection to be Auctioned at Sotheby’s Next Week
Next week, an exceptional collection is set to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York, during a sale entitled Vision: The Extraordinary Collection of Theodore and Ruth Baum. Assembled over several decades, this collection of more than 130 works is estimated at over $100 million. It offers a remarkable overview of postwar art, ranging from American abstraction to Pop Art and the European avant-garde. More than twenty works will be offered in a dedicated Evening Auction on November 16, followed by a Day Auction on November 17, with additional works from the collection scheduled to be sold through 2027.
Theodore “Ted” Baum had trained as an industrial engineer before becoming a pioneer of the American cable television industry, while Ruth ran her own interior decorating company and was herself a keen painter and draughtswoman. Their respective backgrounds seem to have fed naturally into the way they collected: Ted brought a taste for innovation and research, while Ruth had a particularly strong eye for how artworks could inhabit a domestic space. Together, they built the collection over several decades, while also supporting institutions such as the Guggenheim, the Parrish Art Museum and the Norton Museum of Art.
The couple’s collecting journey began in the late 1970s, when Ruth Baum bought a John Sloan sketch at a charity auction. From there, the couple started collecting drawings and watercolours by 20th-century artists such as Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso. A few years later, they sold much of this first collection in order to finance what they imagined would be their one great painting: a work by Rothko. This painting—Rothko’s red and orange Untitled (1967)—is of course among the highlights of the sale: it was the couple’s first acquisition of contemporary art, in 1983. It is now estimated to fetch between $10 million and $15 million. Quite the remarkable first buy... It also goes to show that collecting is more about living with a few works that strongly resonate with you and keeping the collection selective, rather than accumulating artworks. The painting stayed with them for 43 years and ended up becoming the starting point for the much broader collection that followed. Before entering the Baum collection, it had passed through several major dealers, including Galerie Beyeler and Annely Juda Fine Art.
Another major work of the sale is Joan Mitchell’s Green Book of Barbara Guest (1960), an exceptional large-scale composition nearly 2.30 meters tall, which the Baums have owned for four decades; it is estimated at between $12 million and $18 million. The depth is quite incredible in this picture, as the abstract expressionism of Mitchell seems to float forward in space. There are also works by Sam Francis, Hans Hofmann, Lichtenstein, and Wesselmann. The Mitchell was acquired from Xavier Fourcade in New York in 1986 and will be making its auction debut this November. It had previously only been exhibited at the Stable Gallery in New York and Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles in 1961.
Along the couple’s collecting journey, their attention was also drawn to iconic works of Pop Art. This interest developed in the late 1990s, notably through acquisitions of works by Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein. such as Ed Ruscha’s Dimple (1964), which features a seemingly innocuous word, the last letter of which is physically compressed by a clamp, blurring the boundaries between language and representation. It is estimated to fetch between $10 million and $15 million. Also up for auction is Andy Warhol’s The Scream (After Edvard Munch) (1984), a Pop Art reinterpretation of this icon of art history. The Baums acquired Dimple in 2002, while The Scream entered their collection after they purchased it at Sotheby’s London in 2006. Last but not least in this exceptional sale: two masterpieces of the Italian avant-garde—Alberto Burri’s GA1 (1954) and Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attese (1960), both estimated at between $4 million and $6 million. These acquisitions show how the collection gradually expanded beyond American postwar art, as the Baums gathered an important group of European works by artists such as Fontana, Burri, Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein. Their Fontana was acquired at Sotheby’s London in 2000, followed by the Burri at the same auction house in 2005.
All these works were very much part of the Baums’ daily lives. Their homes in Palm Beach, Southampton, New Jersey and New York mixed postwar and contemporary art with European and Ming furniture, and Ruth Baum herself simply explained that they loved both the process of collecting and living with the works. The sale will therefore be an interesting one to follow next week from a market perspective, especially given the quality and long ownership histories of the main lots. In a selective market, works that have remained in the same collection for several decades tend to attract particular attention—especially when they come from strong periods and have rarely appeared publicly.
Vision: The Extraordinary Collection of Theodore and Ruth Baum
Evening Auction — November 16, 2026, 6:00 PM EST
Day Auction — November 17, 2026, 9:00 AM EST
Sotheby’s New York
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