Christie’s has secured the art collection of television writer, producer, and political advocate Norman Lear and his wife, Lyn Davis Lear, the auction house announced Monday. Lear passed away in December at 101 years old.
Seven works from the collection will debut during the house’s 20th Century Evening Sale on May 16, with additional works appearing in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale, among others. The entire collection is expected to fetch more than $50 million.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lear brought a sense of social realism and political commentary into network sitcoms like All in the Family and The Jeffersons, clearing a path for a golden age of television reshaping the American cultural conversation. Lear was a stalwart advocate for the political left, founding the organization People for the American Way, and, after purchasing a copy of the Declaration of Independence in 2001, which he took on tour in order to let the general public interact with America’s founding document, founding the voting initiative Declare Yourself.
Lear was also an avid collector of twentieth-century modern art, especially works by post-war artists who worked in dialogue with America’s changing political and cultural landscape. In the early ’70s, he befriended Robert Rauschenberg while the artist was working at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, and owned an early work from the artist’s “Spread” series, Rodeo Palace (Spread), 1975–76, which is among the works that Christie’s will auction.
The collection’s highlight is David Hockney’s classic Los Angeles landscape A Lawn Being Sprinkled (estimated at $25 million – $35 million). There are also works by Abstract Expressionists and contemporary masters like Willem de Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly, and Joseph Cornell. Also notable is an Ed Ruscha word painting, Truth (1973), estimated at $7 million to $10 million, and a study of Roy Lichtenstein’s I Love Liberty, both of which speak to Lear’s commitment to social justice.
“The art that Norman and Lyn collected together is, like his era-defining shows, marked as much by the exploration of ideas as by an exquisite sense of craft,” Max Carter, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art said in a press release.
His wife of over three decades, Lyn Davis Lear, 76, is a filmmaker in her own right and has a PhD in Psychology. She was elected to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s board of trustees in 2011. Like her husband, she is a fierce advocate. With him and Cindy Horn, she co-founded the Environmental Media Association which works to promote environmental causes in the entertainment industry.