Willem de Kooning - Estate

Estate

Since 1989, De Kooning's oeuvre was controlled primarily by sculptor Lisa de Kooning, his only child and heir; attorney John Eastman, the son of de Kooning’s longtime attorney Lee Eastman; and John Silberman, an attorney who represented Lisa and Eastman in their court application to be appointed as de Kooning’s conservators and later represented his estate. De Kooning's art collection was then valued at $50 million to $150 million. By 1996, Lisa de Kooning and Eastman decided to put the work into a trust for the artist's benefit that would become a foundation after his death. After de Kooning’s death, Lisa and Eastman became co-executors of his estate, and, in an effort to protect the market for his work, they won a court order to seal details about the estate’s contents. They directed the dispersal of works in de Kooning’s possession at the time of his death and created the Willem de Kooning Foundation, which was established in 2001 and received a portion of the collection not sold or kept by Lisa De Kooning. The estate does have a small portion of art from the 1970s, but most of its work is from the 1980s. Since its establishment, the foundation has sold 18 works for a total of $13 million with the goal of funding its mission to catalogue and maintain its own collection and archive and facilitate museum exhibitions and scholarly research.

In 2010, the Pace Gallery was given the rights to the estate of Willem de Kooning. The estate had previously been handled by the Gagosian Gallery, as well as by Matthew Marks, Lucy Mitchell-Innes and Anthony d'Offay.