Most people who know Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother have never seen the mother’s thumb. Interior designer Vicente Wolf has owned a print that shows it — and that print is one of the highlights of The Vicente Wolf Photography Collection, which Christie’s is offering in New York in a two-part single-owner sale, with the auction scheduled for October 22.
Wolf is best known for residential, hospitality and commercial interiors, but for nearly five decades he has run a parallel career as a photography collector. By his own account, the habit started with advice from Richard Avedon. The result is a collection of nearly 200 photographs that Christie’s will split across one live and one online auction.
The thumb that Lange removed
The story of the Lange print is the kind collectors love. Wolf says he hunted for the right Migrant Mother for a long time before spotting one in an auction catalogue. Looking closely, he noticed something he had never seen in the famous 1936 image taken in Nipomo, California: the mother’s thumb in the frame. Research showed that Lange edited the thumb out after the first few images were printed, which makes early prints like Wolf’s a window onto how the photograph originally looked.
“I thought this was the perfect image to own of Dorothea Lange because A, of its uniqueness and B, because it made it just a little different than every other image that you see of Migrant Mother,” Wolf said in the Christie’s announcement. “I think details like that bring an image back to the days when the original photograph was taken.”
Who else is in the sale
The collection reads like a condensed history of 20th-century European and American photography. Names in the catalogue include:
- Alexander Rodchenko, including a unique photomontage created with Varvara Stepanova
- Edward Steichen, with Wind Fire – Thérèse Duncan on the Acropolis (1921)
- Man Ray and Lee Miller, including Man Ray’s 1930 portrait of Miller
- Edward Weston, Dunes, Oceano (1936)
- Richard Avedon, Igor Stravinsky, Composer, New York City, November 2, 1969
- Constantin Brâncusi, Diane Arbus, André Kertész and Francesca Woodman
- Eugène Atget, Ilse Bing and Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer)
Christie’s describes the European avant-garde material — Italian Futurism, Surrealism and Constructivism, with rare works by Tato, Umbo and Raoul Ubac — as the core of the offering, much of it fresh to market. According to the auction house, the European modernist photographs carry estimates ranging from US$1,000 to over US$200,000. The sale also features work by Bauhaus-trained Japanese photographer and architect Iwao Yamawaki.
A Playboy curiosity
Not every lot is a gallery classic. One of the more unusual items is an anonymous press print of Marilyn Monroe, hand-masked as a mock-up for the very first cover of Playboy in 1953 — a rare glimpse of how magazine covers were assembled before digital layout.
Rebecca Jones, Head of the Photographs Department at Christie’s, called the collection “a unique labor of love” that spans “geographies, movements, and eras”, from American Modernism to Europe’s interwar period. For anyone who follows the photography market, the October 22 sale in New York will show how buyers price a designer’s eye assembled over half a century.
