When a spreadsheet detailing a valuable art collection landed in the inbox of the Christie’s vice chairman Max Carter in the spring, he did a double take.
Here was a trove of multimillion-dollar paintings by the likes Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse and Max Ernst that seemed to come out of nowhere. “It was one of these collections that was so private,” Carter said, that he had seen only a couple of the works reproduced in black-and-white in books and never knew who owned them.
The answer, it turned out, was a couple who almost never lent their holdings to museums and kept a low profile in the art world: Robert F. Weis, the former chairman of the supermarket chain Weis Markets, and his wife, Patricia G. Ross Weis. For nearly seven decades, they kept the majority of their treasures — including a blazing red and orange painting by Mark Rothko from 1958 valued at around $50 million and a 1932 Picasso portrait of his lover Marie-Thérèse valued at around $40 million — tucked away inside a modest ranch-style house in Sunbury, Pa., a Susquehanna Valley town of fewer than 10,000 people.
Following the deaths of Robert Weis in 2015 and Patricia Weis in 2024, their three children are selling the 80 works, which are estimated to bring in more than $180 million at Christie’s marquee New York art auctions in November. To secure the business, Christie’s offered the family a financial guarantee, agreeing to pay a minimum price for the collection in advance, regardless of whether every object finds a buyer. That sum is nearly $200 million, according to art market experts.
Christie’s willingness to commit a hefty financial guarantee roughly five months ahead of the sale signals its confidence in the material, art advisers said.
The auction will be closely watched as a bellwether for the trade, which has contracted three years in a row amid geopolitical instability, rising inflation and the changing tastes of a new generation of buyers. In the first half of this year, auction sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips fell 6 percent from the first half of 2024, according to the research firm ArtTactic. The decline was especially pronounced in the postwar and contemporary sector, which contracted by 19 percent in the year’s first half. What was meant to be the New York spring auction season’s priciest lot — a 1955 bust by Alberto Giacometti, “Grande tête mince (Grande tête de Diego)” — failed to sell at Sotheby’s with an estimate of more than $70 million, signaling the increasingly thin air at the top of the market.
Hoping to avoid that kind of public failure this season, auction houses are pushing sellers to recalibrate expectations and lower estimates. “We lived through an incredible bubble,” said the art adviser Wendy Cromwell, referring to the market’s growth from 2008 to 2022. “There are still people who want to buy a Franz Kline or Mark Rothko — there are just fewer of them. A lot of people bought already who could afford it, and now they are doing other things with their money.”
The contents of the Weis collection will be a surprise even to most art professionals. While today’s leading collectors build private museums, host champagne-fueled galas and broadcast their purchases on social media, Robert Weis preferred to read up on art from the comfort of his Pennsylvania living room in between visits to galleries in New York, where the family kept an apartment. Rather than waving his paddle, he relished picking up a painting at a discount after it failed to sell at auction. One example is a red and blue geometric Mondrian from 1939-1941, which had no takers when it was offered at Christie’s in 1998 with an estimate of up to $2.5 million. It returns in November almost 30 years later with an estimate roughly 10 times as high ($20 to 30 million).
Cromwell, the art adviser, described the Weis collection as a “unicorn” that represents a bygone era. The couple displayed their children’s handmade ceramics alongside those by the celebrated British potters Lucie Rie and Hans Coper; Patricia Weis matched the couch cushions to a 1937 interior scene by Matisse, which is expected to sell for $15 million to $25 million.
The couple disagreed over only one acquisition: a 12-foot-tall bronze by Julian Schnabel. Patricia insisted her husband install it at the edge of the property “so she couldn’t see it from her bedroom window,” their daughter Jennifer Weis recalled. But eventually, Patricia came to love the piece so much that her husband moved the pool house to bring it back into view. (Apparently, that was easier than moving the 3,190-pound sculpture.)
The couple’s son Jonathan Weis, the chief executive of Weis Markets, said that “living in a small town where a lot of people didn’t know” about the value or significance of the family’s art collection “created a magical world within a world.”
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