Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson built an unforgettable collection defined by humanity and humour

‘In the art world there are a lot of followers — a few leaders and a lot of followers,’ the late collector Stefan Edlis quipped in the 2018 art world documentary The Price of Everything. Before passing in 2019 at age 94, Edlis, along with his wife, Gael Neeson, built one of America’s most important collections of post-war and contemporary art. Embracing works that were both joyful and defiant, the discerning couple established themselves as steadfast cultural leaders championing work that uprooted conventions and broadened the definition of what art could be. This November, Christie’s is honoured to present more than 40 groundbreaking works of art and design from the couple’s collection during the November marquee week in New York, first on 19 November in the 21st Century Evening Sale and followed by the Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale on 20 November. Additional offerings from the collection will appear in December and through 2026.

Iconic, playful and strikingly forthright examples by America’s leading contemporary artists lead the selection. ‘Humour and meaning were the touchstones of their collection. They wanted to live with works that helped them understand the underbelly of society but were also joyful, whether Ed Ruscha’s How Do You Do? (2003), an iconoclastic Urs Fischer sculpture or a Diego Giacometti console,’ says Sara Friedlander, Christie’s Deputy Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art. In addition to artworks by Ruscha and Fischer are pieces by George Condo, John Currin, Marlene Dumas, Jeff Koons, Claes Oldenburg and Cindy Sherman. Also featured are works of avant-garde and Art Deco design by Giacometti, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann and Jean Dunand, amongst others.

Resilience reflected through collecting

Born in Vienna in 1925 and raised Jewish, Edlis fled Nazi-occupied Austria for the United States in 1941 with his mother and two siblings. He then served in the US Navy during World War II, after which he made moulds for a toolmaker. By 1954 Edlis was running the company, and 11 years later he set up on his own, establishing what became the Apollo Plastics Corporation. During a ski trip to Wisconsin in 1974, Edlis met Neeson, a medical technician living in Europe. The couple soon returned to America and, under the guidance of notable Chicago collector Gerald Elliot, set about on a lifelong journey devoted to the arts. An early recommendation by Elliot, Larry Rivers’s Four Mollys (1957), will be offered at Christie’s in 2026.

The couple’s first major acquisition came in 1977 when they bought Piet Mondrian’s Large Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow for $675,000 at Christie’s newly opened saleroom in New York. While most collectors at the time were focused on Abstract Expressionism, Edlis and Neeson gravitated towards radical modern European art and Pop art. ‘We discovered you could buy art that had just been painted, not just work out of a book. And that was even more exciting,’ Edlis once commented.

Edlis and Neeson believed in the power of art to interpret the complex world around them. Challenging art should not be avoided — rather it can provide meaningful and constructive discourse on the human condition. ‘For Stefan and Gael, art is a way of life, a philosophy, a way of connecting, a means to share information,’ said Jeff Koons, one of the couple’s close friends, who also included the artists Currin, Sherman, Fischer, and Eric Fischl. ‘Through their own experiences and sensitivities, [Edlis and Neeson] have experienced the power of art and its ability to change the potential parameters of a human being.’

Arguably the most provocative work in Edlis and Neeson’s collection is Maurizio Cattelan’s Him (2001). While the work is not being offered as part of the sale in New York, it will be viewable by request during the November pre-sale exhibition. From behind, the sculpture appears to depict a schoolboy praying, but from the front, the figure is revealed to be a diminutive Adolf Hitler looking towards the sky, as if seeking forgiveness. It may come as a shock that such a sculpture could be found between the library stacks of a man like Edlis, who throughout his life held onto his original Austrian passport, stamped with a large red J indicating the very religion that Hitler sought to eradicate. When asked about the potential inner conflict he may have felt owning the sculpture, Edlis responded, ‘I think it’s a fair question. It’s also irrelevant because it’s art.’

‘Up until the very end of his life Mr. Edlis continued to collect contemporary art,’ says Friedlander. ‘That speaks so much to the man that he was because he didn’t want to live in the past. He dealt with his past, but he really wanted to stay in the present and future.’ This insatiable curiosity was matched only by a trailblazing philanthropic spirit. ‘Stefan came to the States as a refugee with five dollars, but he was always generous. Giving to people was always his way,’ Neeson told Christie’s. In 2015, this culminated in an extraordinary gift, namely the largest single donation in the Art Institute of Chicago’s history: 44 works from their collection (valued in excess of half a billion dollars), including Andy Warhol’s Liz #3 (1963) and Jasper Johns’s Target (1961). As part of the gift, the works will remain on view as a group for at least 25 years after their installation.

Inside Edlis and Neeson’s cutting-edge collection

While the works donated to the Art Institute of Chicago tended towards the abstract, Edlis and Neeson chose to continue living with an evocative group of contemporary painting, sculpture and photography. Their Chicago home was full of uncanny encounters, from Ron Mueck’s crawling Big Baby, whose wide eyes narrowly avoid gazing upon Urs Fischer’s nearby female-nude candle sculpture, to Richard Prince’s gun-bearing cowboy. ‘Stefan had complete disinterest in ‘good taste’. Instead, he and Gael had a strong attraction to provocative, challenging, brilliant, and often confounding new forms of expression, which usually turned good taste on its head,’ Lisa Phillips, the Toby Devan Lewis Director of New York’s New Museum, reflected.

In addition to portraiture and humour, the works in Edlis and Neeson’s collection share themes of mythmaking, authorship and mortality, as well as the influence of art history. Three important works by Andy Warhol embody the tensions between these ideas. The Last Supper (1986), a 40-by-40-inch electric-yellow painting, is one of 22 works from this series, commissioned in 1984 by dealer Alexander Iolas to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. Warhol’s source image for the screenprint, however, was not the original painting but rather a black-and-white photograph of a 19th-century engraving in J.D. Champlin’s Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings. In Warhol’s painting, the image of the Last Supper reaches us through no less than five layers of mediation.

What would be the last commission of Warhol’s career accrued additional meaning when just a month after returning to New York from the opening in Milan, the artist was admitted to hospital for gallbladder surgery and died. Despite being a devout Catholic, Warhol called his Last Supper series ‘crypto-religious’, adding ‘the question of whether and how they are religious is central to their effect.’ After surviving an assassination attempt in 1968, Warhol’s preoccupation with death — and its symbolic memento mori referents — intensified, resulting in works such as his Skull series. The offered high-contrast example from 1975 remained in Warhol’s personal collection until his death in 1987.

The Edlis Neeson Collection also includes Warhol’s Oxidation Painting (Diptych) (1978), the first series since the artist’s early career to be produced without a photographic element. One of only three diptychs in the series, the present work is a revelation of Warhol’s bold reimaging of abstraction, achieved through different methods of applying urine to the canvas, where it chemically reacted with metallic pigments. Subversive and groundbreaking, the series is quintessentially Edlis and Neeson.

The collection additionally features several works by Richard Prince, including the painted-bronze sculpture Untitled (Cowboy) (2011-13) and the iconic painting Double Nurse (2001). Considered as the artist’s self-portrait, the former work was made from a cast of a mannequin that Prince’s wife gave him for his 62nd birthday. Prince spent two years adjusting the figure and adding a new hat, boots, and a double holster with guns. After having it cast, Prince experimented with elevating the sculpture on a box of plywood, a material used in Hollywood Westerns, which he then also cast in bronze. Double Nurse also features a distinctly American subject, while bringing notions of gender, appropriation and cultural nostalgia into question. One of the first Nurse paintings Prince made, this example is the only instance in which the image of the nurse is repeated.

Two other standout canvases by leading American painters highlight the sale. Ruscha’s How Do You Do? (2003) is the largest of the artist’s celebrated Mountain paintings to come to market. Juxtaposing imagined landscapes drawn from mass media imagery with provocative phrases, the work reflects the artist’s desire ‘to make pictures by using words’.

Another painting which hung pride of place in the couple’s apartment, George Condo’s highly desirable multi-figure Abstract Conversation (2010), pointedly demonstrates how Western art, from the Dutch Old Masters to the New York graffiti scene, has shaped the artist’s oeuvre. Condo refers to his hybridisation of invented characters as ‘Artificial Realism’ — his self-declared genre of ‘psychological cubism’ is befitting Edlis and Neeson’s boundary-defying collection.

A love of sculptural design

Complementing the collectors’ unparalleled eye for contemporary art, they similarly sought out the finest examples of sculptural design, another enduring passion for the couple. A standout piece that the couple displayed below Warhol’s The Last Supper is Diego Giacometti’s ‘Promenade des amis’ Console, designed circa 1977. ‘In this rare example, the cast-bronze trees in high relief with a playful scene of hounds and a horse in-front come to life as they balance on the textured back stretcher,’ observes Victoria Tudor, Christie’s Head of Sale, Design.

Exceptional French Art Deco design is also prevalent throughout the Edlis Neeson Collection. Tudor notes, ‘Like Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann envisioned for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, Edlis and Neeson considered the whole as the ultimate — made up of incredible works on an individual level, but all in concert a true mastery of style and taste.’ Ruhlmann, a furniture designer and master cabinetmaker, conceived important commissions for international collectors including the ‘Hydravion’ suite, from which a sleek canape and a pair of armchairs are offered.

Edlis and Neeson’s residence additionally featured a wide array of coveted lacquer vases and objects by Jean Dunand. ‘These examples evidence the artist at the height of his powers,’ Tudor remarks. ‘Dunand meticulously worked with eggshell and dinanderie to create the striking patterns and motifs found here, which soon became synonymous with the era.’

Reflecting on the collection’s breadth and quality, as well as how it so aptly reflects Edlis and Neeson’s own trailblazing journey, Friedlander sees the collection as a touchstone for the next generation of collectors. ‘Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson represented the best of what collecting has to offer. They were philanthropic, inclusive and daring. They spent time developing rich relationships with artists, challenging, provoking and supporting them along the way. What more could you ask for?’