An auction of artwork, including pieces by Pablo Picasso, and other personal items owned by the late supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is expected to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars next week.
Ginsburg’s collection of paintings and ceramics forms the first 17 items in a 115-lot modern art auction hosted by the Potomack company of Alexandria, Virginia, in an online catalog. An additional collection entitled “Chambers & Home” features 145 more lots of miscellaneous curios, including pewter bowls, crystal vases and numerous other personal items.
Ginsburg, the iconic human and civil rights pioneer who died in 2020 aged 87 from complications of pancreatic cancer, owned a multitude of artefacts spanning the last two centuries, by artists including Picasso and Glenna Goodacre.
Among the most personal in Ginsburg’s collection is a Gartenhaus natural black mink coat with Ginsburg’s name embroidered in a pocket. By Thursday morning, bidding for that was already above $2,000, more than twice its original estimate.
Ceramics by Picasso, and an Andy Warhol painting of a can of tomato soup, are among the auction’s other highlights.
“These items are truly tangible pieces of her life and times as one of America’s greatest supreme court justices,” Elizabeth Haynie Wainstein, owner of the Potomack Company, told the New York Times.
“These items would be of interest to all Americans who admired Justice Ginsburg as a civil rights pioneer and defender of equality for all Americans.”
One of the most valuable items in the auction of 20th and 21st century art is a 1953 oil painting, Presagio-Premonition, by the Mexican artist Gunther Gerzso, which is expected to raise up to $100,000.
Proceeds for the two auctions, which end respectively on 27 and 28 April, will benefit the Washington National Opera, of which Ginsburg was a keen supporter and frequent attendee.
In addition, Potomack said it would donate 10% of its commission to help fund fellowships for the Women of Berkeley Law, a student group at the University of California whose law school has produced many trailblazing female legal figures.
Ginsburg, nicknamed “the notorious RBG”, was noted for her advocacy for women’s rights, and the auction is the latest acknowledgment of her importance to the civil and human rights movements.
Last month, the US navy announced it was naming a ship in her honor. In March, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History said it would display, among other items, her famous “dissent collar” which, according to the New York Times, was “the one she wore on days that she gave powerful and pointed opinions at odds with the Supreme Court’s majority”.
This story has been amended on 21 April 2022 to clarify that the Andy Warhol art piece was not part of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s collection, but was an item in the same auction.
