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Shaping a Legacy: Sculpture from the Finn Family Collection

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The story of David and Laura Finn’s collection is one of rare passion and insight. Through close relationships with many of the artists represented in their collection, and friendships with some of their most important dealers, the Finns amassed a collection which conveys a rich history of Post-war European sculpture. As an accomplished photographer himself, David Finn molded that story for generations of collectors with imagery and countless books that now fill the shelves of public and private libraries around the world. The Finns brought the artistic visions of these sculptors to a global audience and their legacy imbues these works with rarified provenance. 

Shaping a Legacy: Sculpture from the Finn Family Collection

  • Alberto Giacometti, Buste de Diego, conceived circa 1957 and cast in 1957-58. Estimate $10,000,000–15,000,000.
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    Of all Giacometti’s representations of the human figure, his extraordinary Buste de Diego is without question one of his most formally radical and visually engaging sculptures. The model for this profoundly expressive sculpture was the artist's younger brother Diego, who inspired numerous variations on the theme of head and bust sculptures of the 1950s and whose physiognomic similarity to his brother invested these projects with an autobiographical narrative. This imposing figure, parting his lips as if he is about to speak, embodies the anticipation of a moment yet to be realized, a robust personification of the Existentialist movement during the heated years of the Cold War.

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  • David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, D.C.
    Alberto Giacometti, Buste de Diego, conceived circa 1957 and cast in 1957-58. Estimate $10,000,000–15,000,000.
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  • Henry Moore, Seated Woman, conceived in 1957 and cast in 1960. Estimate $4,000,000–6,000,000.
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    The human figure was Henry Moore’s abiding passion and the primary subject of his body of work. Seated Woman, conceived in 1957, is one of his best-known and most important works. It belongs to a series of large sculptures of women that Moore created in the 1950s that occupy a key position in his oeuvre. The monumentality of this seated figure marked a bold new approach in his work that was developed from the 1950s onwards, and resulted in seated forms temporarily taking precedence over his favored standing and reclining figures for the rest of the decade.

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  • David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, D.C.
    Henry Moore, Seated Woman, conceived in 1957 and cast in 1960. Estimate $4,000,000–6,000,000.
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  • Germaine Richier, Don Quichotte, conceived in 1950-51. Estimate $1,500,000–2,500,000.
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    An undisputed favorite within Richier’s oeuvre, Don Quichotte exemplifies the technical adventurousness that marked her late career. Standing at over two meters in height, Don Quichotte is one of two sculptures Richier created in a series of works inspired by Miguel de Cervantes’s Spanish novel, Don Quixote. Together, they experimented with the human form, combining a monumental, imposing size with a rich rendering of the surface. 

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  • David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, D.C.
    Germaine Richier, Don Quichotte, conceived in 1950-51. Estimate $1,500,000–2,500,000.
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  • Jean Arp, Torse des Pyrénées, conceived in 1959 and cast in January 1962. Estimate $1,500,000–2,500,000.
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    At the heart of Arp's artistic triumph is the organic beauty of his sculptures, which seems to manifest from a vision unencumbered by any formal constraints. Since his involvement with Dada and Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s, Arp's sculpture was recognised for its ability to transcend conventional boundaries and extend its interpretation to any given viewer's expectations. Often guided by chance and intuition, Arp enjoyed creating irregular shapes evocative of natural forms and parts of the human anatomy. The curves of Torse des Pyrénées evoke various parts of the female torso captured in Arp's amorphous expression of the figure. Although he developed a highly abstract visual vocabulary in his sculptures, Arp always established a connection between these biomorphic shapes and elements of the natural world in such a way as to unveil the mysterious and poetic elements hidden in everyday forms.

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  • David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, D.C.
    Jean Arp, Torse des Pyrénées, conceived in 1959 and cast in January 1962. Estimate $1,500,000–2,500,000.
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  • Marino Marini, Guerriero (Warrior), conceived in 1959-60 and cast by 1964. Estimate $700,000–1,000,000.
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    Equestrian images have a long and esteemed tradition in Western art. Throughout the centuries, paintings and sculptures of men on horseback, often depicting noble cavalrymen or generals mounted on their steed, celebrated the glories and victories of an era or an empire. But the sculptures of riders and horses that Marino Marini created after the Second World War are a radical departure from this tradition. Conceived in the midst of profound political transformation, Marini’s Cavalieri are a response to the wave of uncertainty that engulfed civilization during the Cold War. Marini was obsessed with making the horse and rider theme applicable to the contemporary age, and no other artist in the history of 20thcentury art came close to revitalizing this age-old subject with such creativity and expressive force. His anonymous, highly abstracted horsemen eschew any pomp or pretense and are rich with psychological complexity and formal beauty. 

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  • David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, D.C.
    Marino Marini, Guerriero (Warrior), conceived in 1959-60 and cast by 1964. Estimate $700,000–1,000,000.
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