NEW YORK, NY.- This June, Sotheby's presents Design Week in New York, a three-day series of landmark auctions at the Breuer building on Madison Avenue offering masterworks spanning more than a century of innovation, craftsmanship, and considered living. The week brings together two dedicated single-owner sales: Art & Design from the Collection of Barbara Gladstone on June 9 and Of Form and Color: Art and Design from the Emmanuel de Bayser Collection on June 10, alongside Important Design on June 11, a wide-ranging survey of defining aesthetic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Together, the three sales present an exceptional breadth of historic and contemporary design in dialogue with fine art, reflecting the sustained strength of a market in which the boundaries between these categories continue to dissolve. A public preview exhibition is now on view through June 11.

Art & Design from the Collection of Barbara Gladstone

Live Auction: 9 June 2026
Preview Exhibition: through 7 June 2026

A pioneering gallerist and one of the most consequential figures in the history of contemporary art, Barbara Gladstone spent more than four decades championing artists whose work challenged and redefined the culture. She gave Matthew Barney his first New York solo show in 1991, premiered Richard Prince's landmark Nurse Paintings in 2003, and was among Anish Kapoor's earliest and most influential advocates in the United States. What Art & Design from the Collection of Barbara Gladstone reveals, across 140 lots estimated at $6.9–10 million, is that her eye extended just as far beyond the gallery walls. Art and design coexisted in her homes not as separate categories but as a single, coherent visual language — contemporary works by artists she championed living in direct and considered dialogue with significant pieces of midcentury European and Brazilian modernism, including furniture and objects by Jean Prouvé, Jean Royère, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Paavo Tynell, and Pierre Jeanneret.

Richard Prince
Medusa, 2003
Estimate: $800,000–1,200,000

The top highlight from the collection, Richard Prince's Medusa is a powerful example of the artist's celebrated Car Hood series, in which actual automobile hoods serve as the support for works that merge painting, sculpture, and the readymade into objects of striking physicality. Gladstone represented Prince for more than twenty years and was among his earliest and most influential champions, and Medusa, created the same year as his landmark Nurse Paintings exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, stands as a vivid expression of the relationship between dealer and artist that defined both their careers.

Alex Katz
Halsey 9, 2022
Estimate: $400,000–600,000

Another highlight of the collection, Alex Katz’s Halsey 9 exemplifies the artist’s enduring commitment to reinventing portraiture through the language of immediacy and perception. Created in 2022 as part of his celebrated Halsey series, the work reflects Katz’s mature practice, synthesizing his signature flattened planes of color and crisp contours with a strikingly cinematic compositional approach. Fragmenting the subject into three stacked perspectives, Katz eschews traditional portraiture’s singular viewpoint in favor of a sequential experience, capturing Halsey in a state of subtle transformation across time. Halsey 9 underscores Katz's profound influence on contemporary figuration, merging modernist reduction with the visual immediacy of advertising and cinema, an elegant testament to the artist’s ability to render the fleeting present with enduring clarity.

Jean Prouvé
Sideboard, circa 1948, Model no. BA-12
Estimate: $120,000–180,000

Among the most significant design works in the collection, this Prouvé sideboard stood in Gladstone's New York home in direct company with a Richard Prince painting, offering a vivid illustration of the sensibility that animates the collection as a whole. Produced by Ateliers Jean Prouvé in Nancy, the BA-12 is among the designer's most resolved and sought-after models, its precise industrial construction and elegant proportions reflecting a practice that placed the same demands on functional objects as the finest art.

Of Form and Color: Art and Design from the Emmanuel de Bayser Collection

Live Auction: 10 June 2026
Preview Exhibition: 5–10 June 2026

Shaped over decades of considered living between Paris and Berlin, the collection of Emmanuel de Bayser reflects a singular vision governed not by period or medium but by an unwavering attentiveness to form and color. His Parisian apartment near the Parc Monceau breathes with the easy grandeur of a Haussmannian interior, rooms flowing into one another without corridors, light moving freely through interconnected spaces, while his Berlin residence strikes a quieter, more experimental note, its carefully composed vignettes offering calm counterpoint to the city's restless energy. At the heart of Of Form and Color: Art and Design from the Emmanuel de Bayser Collection, estimated at $5.4–7.7 million, is an extraordinary concentration of works by Georges Jouve, anchoring a rich exploration of French design that extends to Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, François-Xavier Lalanne, and Alberto Giacometti, set against artworks by Anish Kapoor, Jannis Kounellis, and Günther Förg that draw the collection firmly into the present.

Georges Jouve
Large Ceramic Sculpture, circa 1958
Estimate: $70,000–100,000

At the heart of the de Bayser collection lies one of the most exceptional private holdings of Georges Jouve's work assembled in recent decades, approximately one hundred works spanning vases, lamps, sculptures, and functional objects across both residences. This large ceramic sculpture exemplifies Jouve's mastery of the medium as a fully sculptural form: swelling volumes and pierced voids in saturated black glaze that catch light across undulating contours, placing him in direct dialogue with contemporaries such as Henry Moore and Hans Arp. The holding as a whole represents one of the most significant private assemblages of Jouve's output ever to come to auction.

François-Xavier Lalanne
“Mouton de Pierre”
Estimate: $250,000–350,000

“Mouton Transhumant”
Estimate: $250,000–350,000

De Bayser has described François-Xavier Lalanne's Mouton de Pierre and Mouton Transhumant as the works he is most proud of, and their presence in the Paris apartment captures something essential about his approach to living with objects. Positioned in the living room to give the impression they had wandered in from the neighboring Parc Monceau, the sheep embody the warmth and wit that animate even his most considered interiors. Among the most beloved works in the history of 20th-century French design, Lalanne's sheep are equally at home in an interior as in the context of fine art, a quality that makes them emblematic of this collection's central preoccupation.

Alberto Giacometti
Pair of “Étoile” Table Lamps
Estimate: $220,000–280,000

“Étoile” Floor Lamp
Estimate: $175,000–225,000

Few objects in the de Bayser collection speak more directly to its ethos than Giacometti's Étoile lamps. Conceived in patinated bronze, they belong to a body of functional works in which Giacometti's sculptural genius finds expression in objects designed to be lived with rather than contemplated from a distance. In the Paris apartment, the floor lamp stood in the living room alongside the Lalanne sheep and a mirror by Georges Jouve — a grouping that encapsulates de Bayser's gift for placing works of very different registers in quietly revelatory conversation.

Important Design

Live Auction: 11 June 2026
Preview Exhibition: through 11 June 2026

Important Design traces the defining aesthetic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries through a series of exceptional private collections and singular artistic voices. Leading the sale is a Diego Giacometti console from the Collection of Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue. The sale also brings together a refined gathering of works by Claude Lalanne, Jean Royère, Eileen Gray, and Alexandre Noll from a private collection designed by Jacques Grange; a focused offering of works by Jean Royère and Serge Mouille celebrating two towering figures of French midcentury design; an important group of works by George and Mira Nakashima from the collection of Barry and Irene Bloom; and an exceptional survey of works by Harry Bertoia spanning wire constructions, meditative Sonambients, and a rare Dandelion sculpture.

Diego Giacometti
Promenade des Amis Console
From the Collection of Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue
Estimate: $3–5 million

The top lot of Design Week, Diego Giacometti's Promenade des Amis Console leads Important Design with one of the most sought-after and recognizable forms in the history of 20th-century decorative art. Drawn from the distinguished collection of Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue, the console exemplifies Giacometti's singular ability to transform bronze into works of exceptional warmth and vitality, each surface animated by the direct, expressive handling that sets his practice apart from that of his brother Alberto while remaining in profound dialogue with it.

Claude Lalanne
“Structure Végétale” Candelabra, two pairs
Nos. 1 and 2; nos. 3 and 4 from an edition of 4
Estimate: $250,000–350,000 per pair

Among the most distinctive expressions of Claude Lalanne's lifelong engagement with the natural world, the Structure Végétale candelabra exemplifies the vegetal language and galvanoplasty technique that defined her practice across six decades. Composed of gilt bronze and galvanized copper leafy sprigs configured to hold candles, each work animates the distinction between function and sculpture. When lit, light dapples the contrasting metal tones and invigorates the very structure of the piece, transforming it into something that belongs equally to the decorative and fine art traditions. Offered here in two pairs from a strictly limited edition of four, the candelabra reflect the sustained formal intelligence and natural lyricism that have made Claude Lalanne's work among the most beloved in the history of 20th-century French design.

Jean Royère
“Oeuf” Sofa and Armchair
From Sculpting Light, Shaping Form: Works by Jean Royère and Serge Mouille from an Important Private Collection
Sofa estimate: $300,000–500,000
Armchair estimate: $100,000–150,000

Designed in 1954, the “Oeuf” suite ranks among Jean Royère's most celebrated achievements, its softly swelling, continuous contours embodying the fully developed biomorphic language that defined his mature practice. Royère described the design in terms of containment and protection, likening it to a round seashell in which the body is cradled, a sensibility that dissolves conventional distinctions between structure and upholstery in favor of fluid, enveloping form. Retained here in Paule Marrot's original floral upholstery, the suite evokes an interior conceived as a living, organic whole, at once deeply personal and emblematic of Royère's most refined work of the 1950s. Jean Royère appears across all three sales this Design Week, a reflection of the enduring collector demand for his work and of the particular warmth and vitality his objects bring to any interior.

Harry Bertoia
Untitled
Estimate: $300,000–500,000

Harry Bertoia's practice resists easy categorization, encompassing sculpture, sound, furniture, and printmaking in a body of work that treats each medium as an extension of the same restless formal intelligence. The exceptional group of works offered here spans the full breadth of his singular practice, from wire constructions and the meditative Sonambients that translated physical form into acoustic experience, to a rare Dandelion sculpture that stands among the most striking achievements of his career.

Mira Nakashima
Sanso Dining Table, 1999
From Important Works by George and Mira Nakashima from the Collection of Irene and Barry Bloom
Estimate: $40,000–60,000

Since joining the family business in 1970 and assuming creative leadership following her father's death in 1990, Mira Nakashima has helmed Nakashima Woodworkers, now a National Historic Landmark in New Hope, Pennsylvania, producing one-of-a-kind, hand-crafted, made-to-order furniture that carries forward one of the defining legacies of the American Studio furniture movement while bearing the unmistakable imprint of her own architectural eye. The Sanso dining table is among the most celebrated forms associated with the studio, its single-slab English walnut top traversed by East Indian rosewood butterfly keys that stabilize the wood while becoming the work's most eloquent visual detail — a signature of the Nakashima practice in which structural necessity and aesthetic intention are indistinguishable. Drawn from the deeply considered collection of Irene and Barry Bloom, the table exemplifies the philosophy at the heart of the studio's work: that furniture is not acquired for display but lived with over time, its natural character deepening through daily use and the slow accumulation of life around it.

Paavo Tynell
“Snowflake” Chandelier
From a Prominent New York Collection
Estimate: $250,000–350,000

Among the most celebrated works of the Finnish master Paavo Tynell, the Snowflake chandelier represents the pinnacle of his achievement in pierced and painted metal, a form that transforms light into atmosphere, scattering luminous patterns across walls and ceilings in a manner that is at once rigorously geometric and entirely alive. Tynell's work appears across all three sales this Design Week, a reflection of the sustained collector interest in his practice and of the particular quality of light and warmth his objects bring to an interior.