Marilyn Monroe’s candlesticks and a rediscovered Peter Paul Rubens will go on sale as part of a $16 million Sotheby’s charity auction.
Opening in October, The Manny Davidson Collection comes with a personal history. The eponymous property developer spent decades filling his homes with eye-catching and “exceptional” artifacts, including a work with an attribution to Rubens that had been rejected by the Tefaf Maastricht fair’s blue-chip vetting committee. Undeterred, Davidson bought it anyway.
He was later vindicated when the painting was found to have been “sawn off from the same plank of oak” as a Rubens housed in the Louvre — such discrimination was typical, a friend told the Financial Times: “The collection is Manny and vice versa.”
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