An Anthology of Changing Ideas

For Leonard ‘Len’ and Louise Riggio, collecting reflected their lifelong curiosity about the world. As the founder of Barnes & Noble who transformed a single storefront into the world’s largest bookseller, Len was driven by an incessant desire to learn, to discover and to bring joy. That spirit of discovery embodies the collection that he and his wife, Louise, lovingly built together. The couple were trusted partners in all aspects of life — from business to philanthropy to art. As generous patrons of the arts, they played an instrumental role in shaping the landscape of New York’s art world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. On collecting, Louise notes, ‘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. We always talked about the dialogue each of the pieces had with each other, which inspired and complemented their placement. While it will be like saying goodbye to old friends, I’m happy to share these pieces with the world.’

Their collecting journey began in earnest in the 1990s, the moment Len saw Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses at Dia Chelsea, an experience which in part inspired his dedicated stewardship of Dia Beacon. From that moment forward, the couple became entrenched in learning about art. Len was drawn to contemporary objects; Louise’s preferences are more historical, and yet while their tastes varied, they blended beautifully. Over the course of 30 years, the couple assembled one of the world’s most significant collections of 20th century art.

They not only acquired works for the pleasure of living with beautiful objects, but also for the engagement it gave them with artists who challenged some of our most profound ideas about art and life. Within their elegant New York apartment, works by the leading figures of Modernism and Post-Modernism sat side-by-side, showcasing the rich and multi-layered dialogues that existed between artists working across different movements, media and periods of history, revealing unexpected affinities and connections in the process.

This May, Christie’s is proud to offer Leonard & Louise Riggio: Collected Works in New York. From radical new visual languages and Surrealist musings on consciousness, to the enduring influence of classicism and the artist’s own existential investigations into the self, this rich, encyclopaedic collection demonstrates Len and Louise’s appreciation for the ways in which creativity is central to the human condition.

A New Language

Working across different media, geographies and time periods, numerous artists across the century developed expanding approaches to abstraction and non-figurative art, in their pursuit of a universal shared visual language, suitable to the modern age. One important figure in this was Piet Mondrian, whose revolutionary Neoplasticism proposed an ideal art based on the pure elements of painting – colour, line and form.

Painted in 1922, Mondrian’s Composition With Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue encapsulates the purity, elegance and extreme rigor of his mature aesthetic. Filled with a dynamic internal energy, in which each line, plane, and colour is brought to life by its relationship to the other elements within the painting, this work proves just how dynamic Mondrian’s restrained artistic language could be.

Beyond Consciousness

The quest to communicate a deeper truth through art extended to the Dadaists, Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, who considered art as a visual manifestation of the psyche, incorporating dream imagery, hallucinations, and the unconscious impulse into their creative endeavours. It was famed Surrealist René Magritte who said, ‘I showed objects situated where we never find them. They represented the realization of the real, if unconscious, desire existing in most people.’

Magritte would explore pairing the unexpected throughout his oeuvre: the collision of night and day in a single moment in his L’empire des lumières series or the uncanny pairing of objects before a gentle seascape in Les droits de l’homme.  

The Surrealist spirit left a strong impression on Pablo Picasso, too. In 1937 he spent several weeks in the company of a circle of Surrealist writers, poets and artists, while holidaying in Mougins in the South of France. His 1937 portrait of the photographer Lee Miller – Femme à la coiffe d’Arlesienne II – dates from this sun-filled sojourn.

Here, Miller’s vibrant beauty and vitality shine through the canvas despite Picasso’s bold rejection of conventional portraiture. Having absorbed the likeness and character of his sitter during hours spent in her company, Picasso then translated her image through his own, unique pictorial language. In this way, he sought to capture the essence of his subject, their inner selves, rather than their physical appearance alone.

The Enduring Ideal

Despite the many artistic innovations throughout the 20th century, classicism remained a perpetual undercurrent in Modernism and Post-War art. Nowhere is this represented more clearly than in Andy Warhol’s The Last Supper (1986).

In this work—considered among Warhol’s ultimate artistic statements—he revisited and meditated on both his long career and the broader history of art through his engagement with Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic masterpiece. As Warhol said, ‘They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.’

The present work flows from Warhol’s silkscreen series of celebrities created two decades prior in the choice of an iconic, instantly recognisable subject. Leonardo’s early masterpiece became an obsession for Warhol, and he produced an astounding quantity of preparatory material for this work in order to deconstruct and reimagine Da Vinci’s tableaux. This duplicated interpretation of an iconic image asserts Warhol’s own position in the art historical canon, while also giving us a powerful reiteration of the principles and techniques that served his entire artistic enterprise.

Similarly, for Balthus, the art of the Renaissance was an important touchstone, its rigour and clarity offering a key model for his own approach to form. ‘If we could return to Giotto’s deliberation, Masaccio’s exactitude, and Poussin’s precision!’ he wrote. ‘Real modernity is in the reinvention of the past, in refound originality based on experience and discoveries.’ Almost entirely self-taught, Balthus had studied at the Louvre as a youth, making copies of the paintings of the masters of the Italian Quattrocento. Dating from 1944 - 1945, Jeune fille en vert et rouge (Le chandelier) directly invokes these traditions. Dressed in a two-toned tunic and heavy cloak, the young woman gazes out towards the viewer, her classical form and the exactingly described still-life before her a reflection of Balthus’s lifelong reverence for the Old Masters.

The Existential Self

While many artists were impacted by outside influences in their work, others turned inward to investigate the human condition, interrogating concepts of agency, individuality and subjective experience through their own unique artistic lens. In Untitled (1968), Mark Rothko depicts two rectangular panes of dark pigment over a ground of hazy amber. Despite its deep, atmospheric palette, the work radiates with an internal light and fully articulates Rothko’s practice during this important period of his career.

Untitled embodies Rothko’s existentialist philosophy and reveals the enduring possibilities of painting as a meaningful practice. It challenges and probes the spectator’s own experience, its subtle surface demanding close scrutiny. Only with close engagement does the work begin to reveal itself.

Alberto Giacometti explored similar concerns through the human figure, investigating questions of presence and perception in his painterly and sculptural work. In his renowned series known as the Femmes de Venise, Giacometti sought to emphasise and reveal his own position in the sculptural process, each work a reflection of his thoughts at a particular moment.

Comprising nine individual standing female figures cast in bronze, this group of works played a significant role in establishing the artist’s fame and reputation. Across the series, the figure grows, shrinks, is flattened and then rounded, eroded and developed, following the artist’s flowing vision. Among the earliest sculptures created as part of this groundbreaking series, Femme de Venise I embodies many of the key tenets and concepts that characterized Giacometti’s visionary project.

From these masterpieces to notable works by Arshile Gorky, groundbreaking sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, contemporary artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Glenn Ligon, the collection is underpinned by a series of unique dialogues.