An “anthology of 20th-century masterpieces” is coming to Christie’s, courtesy of art collector Louise Riggio, widow of the late bookstore entrepreneur Leonard Riggio of Barnes & Noble fame. Why now? Simply put, it’s time to downsize, Louise Riggio told the New York Times. Leonard passed away in August of 2024 at age 83 after battling Alzheimer’s, and Louise is loath to put pieces from their collection into storage. “While it will be like saying goodbye to old friends, I’m happy to share these pieces with the world,” she said in a statement.
In 2016, Leonard hinted in an interview with ARTnews at the possibility of lending or even giving curated groups of works to museums or other cultural institutions. While that didn’t happen, the couple supported access to art in other ways—most visibly via gifts to the Dia Art Foundation totaling in the millions that directly led to the opening of Dia Beacon in Upstate New York in 2003 and its acquisition of Richard Serra’s “Torqued Ellipses.” Notably, the couple’s philanthropic activity extended to public education, literacy and civil rights.
Over three decades, the Riggios amassed one of the world’s most significant assemblages of 20th-century art, and collectively, the more than thirty artworks in the Leonard & Louise Riggio: Collected Works sale are expected to realize in excess of $250 million. Leading the auction is a rare painting by Piet Mondrian: Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue from 1922, the year after he published his essay “Neo-Plasticism.” The other lots—what we know of them, at least—are just as spectacular. There’s the very first work from René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières series, along with his Les droits de l’homme. There’s a 1937 Pablo Picasso portrait of photographer Lee Miller, several Alberto Giacometti sculptures, including Femme de Venise I, and one of Andy Warhol’s Last Suppers.
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The total Riggio collection is vast, with works by Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Chuck Close and Walter de Maria, and pieces by Arte Povera artists including Mario Merz and Pier Paolo Calzolari. Another focus area was large-scale sculpture, with artists like Isamu Noguchi, Willem de Kooning, Niki de Saint Phalle and Mark di Suvero prominently represented in the collection. The couple’s property in Bridgehampton, New York, hosts Serra’s Sidewinder (1999), Maya Lin’s Lay of the Land (2016), the De Maria Garden and Pavilion designed by Gluckman Tang to house sculpture and drawings by Walter De Maria and a Noguchi viewing pavilion by Gluckman Mayner Architects.
“When Len and I bought a piece of art, we felt as if we were inviting that work into our home to live with us, to become part of our family,” Louise Riggio said. “We always talked about the dialogue each of the pieces had with each other, which inspired and complemented their placement.”
Works from the Riggio collection will embark on a global tour, hopping from London to Hong Kong in March and then heading to Paris, Dubai and Los Angeles in April before returning to New York for the dedicated evening sale leading Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auction series.
“We bought quietly,” Louise Riggio told the New York Times—or with as much quietude as one can when one is waving one’s own paddle at record-setting art auctions, which is something Leonard is remembered for. He was present at Christie’s in 2014 when the auction house brought in the highest-ever total for a single sale: $852.9 million across seventy-five lots. “The material was good,” Riggio told Observer as he exited that particular auction in what was probably one of the great understatements of the decade.
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