Hello sports fans, and welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion
Maneker, standing here with a Dixie cup of water as the world burns.
Tonight, Julie Davich has the story of a trove of Abraham Lincoln artifacts that are being auctioned to pay off the debts of a foundation that made some unwise investments. She also stops in at a design gallery in Tribeca featuring the work of Ettore Sottsass.
But first, a little housekeeping…
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- Tariffs, tariffs, who’s got tariffs?: Mrs. Wallpower and I were at a gallerist’s dinner on Friday night where the conversation inevitably turned to the confusion about tariffs. “Will the tariffs include art?” one dealer, who does a brisk business in art and design objects, mused. “Right now, it is just furniture—but if he does add art, it will wreck our business.”
At the moment, no one is certain that art is exempt. I texted art advisor
Adam Green, who has been managing the tariff issue for some Canadian clients, and has been posting information about art and tariffs all week. He sent me a link explaining that the president is not given the authority to regulate communications, humanitarian donations, and information under the legal
pretext for his emergency tariff implementation. Thus, art works, which are considered a form of speech, expression, and information, are exempt. That’s great.
But don’t get too comfortable: First, there’s no
telling whether Trump will actually honor any of these provisions. Second, of course, there’s always the threat that other countries may slap retaliatory levies on imports of American art. Also, as Green reminded me, the determination of where a work of art originates is tied to where it was fabricated—so it all comes down to where the art is made, not who makes it. If an American artist has a bronze sculpture fabricated in France and it is sold to a Spanish collector, it won’t be subject
to an import tariff.
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- Classic cars evade Trump tariffs: The classic car market in the U.S., according to Bloomberg, includes 43 million cars with a nominal value of $1 trillion. Vintage auto dealers have been understandably fearful that Trump’s 25 percent auto import tariffs would be applied to their
business. Turns out the industry got themselves an exemption for cars 25 years or older. So, while you might not be able to buy a new Land Rover—Jaguar Land Rover is temporarily pausing exports to the U.S.—you can definitely import a vintage one, as long as it has a 1999 or earlier model number.
- About that African American art auction: This past week, I said that the top lots at Swann Galleries’ African American art sale were hit hard by “Liberation
Day.” That remains true. Works by Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, and Ed Clark estimated at $150,000 or above failed to find buyers. But John Biggers’ Death and Resurrection, from 1996, actually did sell, for
$197,000. Let’s chalk that confusion up to the indomitable spirit of art.
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Julie Brener Davich
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Gallery
Hopping With Julie
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Ettore Sottsass, Installation view of the Geology series (2000), Galerie56,
New York. Photo: Antoine Bootz
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Friedman Benda gallery has been practically synonymous with the designs of
Ettore Sottsass since 2007. Now, architect Lee Mindel has gotten in on the action, lending his perspective on the fellow architect’s work. Friedman Benda and Mindel collaborated on the show Et tu, Ettore, on view at Mindel’s Galerie56 in Tribeca through May 12. (The gallery is on the groundfloor of Herzog & de Meuron’s “Jenga tower,” recognizable at street level for Anish Kapoor’s silver “mini-bean.”) The show takes its title from the
famous line in Julius Caesar. It’s a reference to Sottsass’s reputation as “the bad boy of design,” Mindel told me.
It’s an intimate show in an intimate space, with key examples of Sottsass’s furniture, lighting, photography, and ceramics from the 1950s through the 2000s. The centerpiece is all 11 works from his colorful Geology series of tabletop ceramic sculptures from 2000. The origins of Sottsass’s ceramic practice are explored via several 1960s prototypes for
functional forms—vases, containers, and ashtrays—from his personal collection. “When you look at that whole sequence, and even at some of Sottsass’s furniture, it looks like the ‘Jenga’ quality of the building,” Mindel said. Each sculpture was produced in an edition of 12 by Alessio Sarri Ceramiche and is available for between $15,000 and $35,000.
Mindel said he was offered the space during Covid, when the owners of the building, Goldman Sachs and Alexico, were exiting the project. Given
his experience and relationships in the design world—he’s been vetting Design Miami for the past 20 years—Mindel decided to build out a design gallery. Since 2022, he’s staged 12 selling exhibitions from a range of designers from around the world, like whimsical children’s seating by South African Porky Hefer. Concept shows have included an exhibition dedicated to the style of Greta Garbo, and design objects all made from metal. Upcoming shows will feature
design from Italy, Denmark, and Brazil. Said Mindel, “I want to bring the diversity of the world here through art works.”
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
|
At the intersection of artistry and innovation lies Nudo, Pomellato’s most iconic creation. Each
Nudo piece is a miniature masterpiece, where design creativity, expert craftsmanship, and gemstone mastery meet. The Nudo High Jewelry collection embodies Pomellato’s unique vision of precious jewelry, combining the collection’s signature lightness and wearability with new levels of creativity and craftsmanship.
LEARN MORE
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And now, on to the main event…
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A trove of Lincoln memorabilia headed for auction in Chicago has
stunning depth, with items as intimate as the bloodstained gloves he wore on the night of his assassination. The Lincoln Presidential Foundation, beset by firings, infighting, and a Blago-adjacent scandal, is hoping the proceeds can pay down its debts.
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“It’s Lincoln’s life story in objects,” Darren Winston told me the
other day. Winston is the head of books and manuscripts at Freeman’s Hindman, which is staging the upcoming auction titled “Lincoln’s Legacy.” The 144 items up for sale in Chicago, on May 21, include manuscripts, letters, campaign ephemera, keepsakes, and personal effects that are being consigned by the Lincoln Presidential Foundation in Springfield, Illinois. (The estimate
is around $4 million.) The artifacts span Abraham Lincoln’s teen years through the end of his life, and also include items related to his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
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A Lincoln-Hamlin campaign flag, ca. 1860. Photo: Courtesy of Freeman’s
Hindman
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The oldest item in the sale is a page from Lincoln’s sum book when he was a
15-year-old student in Little Pigeon Creek, Indiana, estimated at $300,000. It is the earliest known example of his writing, filled with long division calculations and a handwritten poem, “Abraham Lincoln is my name / And with my pen I wrote / the same / I wrote in both hast [sic] and speed / and left it here for fools / to read.” Campaign items include an 1860 parade flag bearing the names of Lincoln and his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, estimated at $20,000, and
numerous signed letters and notes on letterhead from the “Executive Mansion,” as it was called before it became known as The White House.
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Bloodstained white kid gloves and a cuff button, both worn by President Abraham Lincoln
the night of his assassination. Photo: Courtesy of Freeman’s Hindman
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The most expensive, and surely most poignant, lot in the sale is the pair of
bloodstained white kid gloves that Lincoln had in his breast pocket the night of his assassination in 1865, estimated at $800,000. Mary Lincoln sold them in 1868 to a collector of presidential memorabilia. Other items relating to the assassination include a cuff button with the initial ‘L’ from the jacket he was wearing that night, preserved by the physician who treated him, estimated at $200,000; a ticket from another theatergoer, estimated at $50,000; and a reward poster for Booth and his
co-conspirators offering up to $200,000 for information leading to their arrest—an incredible sum of money in 1865—estimated at $80,000.
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The story of the collection is nearly as interesting as the pieces themselves. This
trove comprises only about 10 percent of the 1,540 items originally amassed by Lincoln historian and collector Louise Taper, who sold the bulk of her collection to the nonprofit foundation for $23 million in 2007, adding $2 million worth of items as a donation to sweeten the deal. The foundation used the gift to form the core exhibition for a new, $150 million Lincoln museum that had opened in Springfield a couple years earlier.
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The transaction wasn’t without its share of conflicts and controversies. Taper, it so
happened, was on the board of the foundation when she sold them her collection, allegedly rushing them to a decision by saying she had another interested party. At that time, the foundation and the museum both had the same executive director, Rick Beard, who had formerly been C.O.O.
of the New York Historical Society.
The foundation took out a loan to fund the purchase and, in their haste, likely overpaid, since the $23 million included $6.5 million for a stovepipe hat whose authenticity was later called into question. The foundation launched an extensive fundraising campaign to pay off the loan. But the 2008 recession hit them hard, and both organizations were also without leadership for a couple years, which stymied progress. In 2008, Beard was fired from the
foundation after being arrested for shoplifting Seinfeld DVDs at Target. Ironically, it was then-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, before his own prison stint for extortion and racketeering, who ousted Beard. Fundraising efforts were further thwarted over the next few years by the controversy surrounding that stovepipe hat, more leadership shake-ups, and infighting. Eventually, in 2022, the foundation and library dissolved their cooperation agreement, and the
foundation now supports Lincoln’s legacy through other means.
The foundation refinanced the loan three times—in 2015, 2019, and 2022—but that wasn’t enough time to raise the necessary funds, given the fees and interest costs. The outstanding balance on the loan remains $7.8 million. Proceeds from the
Freeman’s Hindman sale will be used to pay it down.
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That’s it for tonight. More on Tuesday,
M
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