Christie’s has unveiled Heroes and Lovers, a nine-work private collection that moves across five centuries of European art while remaining tightly focused on human emotion. The group is estimated in the region of $100 million and will be led by Pablo Picasso’s monumental 1969 painting Le Baiser when seven of the works appear during November Marquee Week in New York.
The final two Old Master works are scheduled for Classic Week in 2027, giving the collection a two-stage sale structure rather than treating it as a single-category event. That format reflects the unusual breadth of the holdings, which range from late Gothic sculpture and Dutch Mannerism to Manet and four works by Picasso.
Picasso’s late Le Baiser anchors the collection
Le Baiser was painted on October 24, 1969, just four years before Picasso’s death. The large canvas shows two lovers absorbed in a forceful kiss and is presented by Christie’s as both a declaration of his relationship with Jacqueline and an example of the extraordinary energy that remained in his late work.
Late Picasso has become increasingly important to collectors because the paintings often combine apparent spontaneity with the accumulated visual language of an artist who had already passed through several major periods. Le Baiser is therefore not merely a romantic image; it is a late-career statement by an artist continuing to test how directly paint could carry emotion.
Dora Maar introduces a very different form of intimacy
A second important Picasso is Tête de femme (Dora Maar), painted in May 1941 during the Nazi occupation of Paris. The portrait uses the fractured, intensely coloured visual language associated with Picasso’s wartime images of Maar, whose face became one of the defining emotional motifs of his work from that period.
Placed beside Le Baiser, the painting changes the meaning of the collection’s title. Love is not presented only as harmony or tenderness; it also appears through anxiety, dependence, conflict and the complicated relationships between artist and sitter.
Old Masters widen the theme from lovers to heroes
Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem’s Hercules and Achelous provides one of the strongest heroic images in the group. The large Dutch Mannerist canvas depicts the violent struggle described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and previously set an auction record for the artist before spending time on long-term loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tilman Riemenschneider’s Saint Catherine adds sculpture to the collection and will be the first Old Master sculpture included as a highlight of Christie’s November marquee-week presentation. Carved in limewood, the work demonstrates the expressive precision that made Riemenschneider one of the most admired sculptors of the late Gothic period.
The collection is designed to be read across centuries
Works by François Le Moyne, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Édouard Manet extend the narrative between the earliest objects and Picasso. Christie’s describes the group as a map of spirituality, sensuality, courage and connection, ideas that recur even though the artists worked in radically different historical conditions.
That thematic approach is useful because private collections are often most compelling when they reveal a point of view rather than a checklist of famous names. Heroes and Lovers suggests a collector interested in emotional extremes and the figure as a vehicle for storytelling, allowing works made centuries apart to feel deliberately connected.
A global preview begins before the New York sales
Highlights are travelling first to Hong Kong, followed by London, Paris and Taipei, before the complete nine-work collection is shown at Christie’s Rockefeller Center headquarters. The tour gives international buyers an opportunity to inspect the works in person before the November evening sale.
For collectors, the $100 million estimate is only one part of the appeal. The greater interest lies in seeing museum-level works from several eras assembled around one private collecting idea, then released back into the market through a sequence of marquee auctions.
