“They act very much like steroids,” Todd Levin, director of New York-based Levin Art Group, which advises collectors, said of guarantees.


Shopped Collection


Many sellers now expect guarantees and often play the auction houses against one another. The estate of Taubman -- a self-made billionaire who bought Sotheby’s in 1983 and served as its chairman after taking the company public -- shopped the collection to Sotheby’s and Christie’s. The trove includes 500 lots, ranging from antiquities to contemporary art.

“It was a competitive back and forth on every single aspect of the proposal,” William Taubman, Taubman’s son and chief operating officer at Taubman Centers Inc., a real estate investment trust, said in a phone interview.

The record guarantee offered by Sotheby’s was an important consideration but not the only one, said Taubman, adding that the company’s marketing plan including the catalogs, events and exhibitions also played a role.

The bulk will be sold in four auctions, including two next week. The “Masterworks” evening sale will have 77 lots, with pieces by Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, with a total estimate of $374.8 million to $526.5 million.

“The guarantee was a critical component of winning the consignment, and winning the consignment was good for our shareholders,” Tad Smith, Sotheby’s chief executive officer, said in an e-mail.


Market Share


Christie’s, under new chief executive officer Patricia Barbizet, has scaled back on its guarantees for November, a reversal of the strategy pursued under former CEO Steven Murphy. Christie’s had aggressively offered guarantees to win market share from Sotheby’s in postwar and contemporary art, leading in the category for nine consecutive seasons in New York. In May, Christie’s sold $1.7 billion of art in a single week.

“People got very greedy after May and it was time to pull back,” Brett Gorvy, Christie’s global head of postwar and contemporary art, said in a phone interview. “We walked away from a lot of material. We wanted to be judicious in going after things that we believed were worth the risk.”