Works from the art collection of Iowa business leader and philanthropist John Pappajohn and his wife, Mary, will be offered as a group highlighting the Christie’s Spring sales in New York next month, the auction house announced Friday.
The Pappajohns were a mainstay on the ARTnews Top 200 collectors list from 1998 to 2014. John passed away in April of last year at 94. Mary, aged 88, died in 2022.
Comprising works by postwar and contemporary luminaries including Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin, and Ad Reinhardt, the collection will be led by Jasper Johns’s 1961 work 0 through 9 (est. $5 million–$7 million), which debuted that same year at the artist’s first European show at Galerie Rive Droite in Paris.
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Johanna Flaum, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art, described the Pappajohns’s collection as “richly reflective of post-war and contemporary art in America” and “best in class,” and praised the couple, who began collecting in the 1960s, for acquiring works that at the time “challenged accepted norms and pushed boundaries, proposing new concepts and ideas of what art could be.”
Also notable among the collection is Agnes Martin’s acrylic and graphite canvas Untitled #7 from 1996 (est. $3 million–$5 million) and Bruce Nauman’s sexually charged Hanged Man (1985, est. $4 million–$6 million).
John and Mary Pappajohn began collection art shortly after they were married in 1961. Their first purchase was a Keith Achepohl print that cost $50. The Pappajohns eventually amassed a collection worth millions, earning a reputation as top-tier collectors and philanthropists and major donors to the Des Moines Art Center, the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, and the University of Iowa.
The John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park, a 4.4-acre, $30 million public park in downtown Des Moines managed by the Des Moines Art Center is among their greatest philanthropic achievements.
Works from the Pappajohns’s collection will be offered throughout the May sales, including both the 20th and 21st Century Evening sales (May 14 and May 16, respectively) and the following day sales.