Sotheby’s is honored to present A New Vista: The David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection, comprising over 50 works spanning seven decades of passionate, purposeful collecting.  

At its core, the David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection is the expression of a shared family vision, one that took shape over seven decades. David Wingate began acquiring objects as a child, starting with stamps and ultimately art, driven throughout his life by the same instinct: to seek out things of beauty and meaning, to study them closely, and to live with them intimately. From masterworks of sculpture by Alberto Giacometti including the providential La Clairière to pivotal paintings by Wassily Kandinsky and Varvara Stepanova and exceptional design works by Tiffany Studios, the collection is united not by period or medium but by the quality of attention that produced it.

The collection's range reflects a sensibility that was always expanding. David was drawn above all to the human figure, to the ways in which artists across centuries and styles returned again and again to the challenge of rendering a person in space. Shoshanna's own practice as an artist deepened the collection’s engagement with works in three dimensions. Their son, Ealan, who would go on to a distinguished career in the art world, played an increasingly central role in shaping the collection’s ambitions, broadening his parents’ engagement with abstraction and Pop art.

David and Shoshanna Wingate’s story began in Israel, where Shoshanna, born in Syracuse, New York, had moved with her family as a child. There she met David, and the two began a partnership that would last 67 years, one shaped by a deep sense of shared identity, a commitment to their community and an abiding love of beautiful things. In 1953, the couple emigrated to the United States with their children, Batsheva and Ealan, settling on Long Island, where they would remain for the rest of their lives.

After arriving in the United States, their relationship with art deepened considerably. Drawn to New York’s galleries and museums, they soon encountered Edith Halpert, an introduction that David later described as revealing “a new vista.” Through Halpert, the Wingates entered the world of American modernism, with David acquiring works by Ben Shahn, Abraham Rattner, William Zorach and other artists in the Downtown Gallery’s celebrated stable. It was through these same visits to the gallery that Ealan first developed the eye that would help shape not only his own career but the collection itself.

From that foundation, the collection grew steadily over seven decades, eventually encompassing paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and design by some of the most celebrated artists of the modern and contemporary eras, among them Alberto Giacometti, Diego Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, and Andy Warhol. Throughout, David’s guiding principle remained consistent. “Everything we bought, we really bought to enjoy,” he once said, “not to put in a vault as an investment.”
For the Wingates, collecting was inseparable from the way they lived. Their home in Old Westbury, designed in a distinctly modernist idiom and decorated by the renowned interior designer John Saladino, was conceived as an environment in which art and design existed in continuous dialogue. Works were placed with care and intention: Giacometti sculptures and Picasso bronzes were positioned against large windows overlooking a forest glade, their forms animated by natural light; Tiffany Studios lamps stood alongside paintings by Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, their luminous glass connecting the decorative and the painterly. For David and Shoshanna, the home itself was the collection's fullest expression.

Shoshanna Wingate brought to the collection not only a collector's eye, but that of an artist. A sculptor herself, her own practice deepened the couple's sustained engagement with works at every scale, from intimate bronzes to monumental figure groups, and gave her an artist's instinct for what made a work truly alive in space.

The Wingates' commitment to their community and to the institutions that sustained Jewish cultural life expressed itself through decades of generous philanthropy. The North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Solomon Schechter School and Temple Beth Sholom in Roslyn Heights were among the many beneficiaries of their giving, and their impact endures in programs and institutions that bear their names, among them the Shoshanna and David Wingate Graduate Curatorial Internship at The Jewish Museum in New York.