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The Herbert Lust Collection Lands at Christie’s, Led by a $30M Giacometti

Alongside blue-chip names like Calder and Stella, the late collector championed overlooked figures including Hans Bellmer, Mary Bauermeister and Carlotta Corpron. According to Max Lust, his grandfather was still actively collecting well into his early 90s.

As we approach the November marquee sales, auction houses are beginning to announce the estates they have secured for the season. Following Sotheby's announcement of Dick Hedreen’s $90 million trove, Christie's announced it had secured the highly anticipated collection of the late collector and scholar Herbert Lust. A longstanding subject of competition between Christie’s and Sotheby’s, Lust’s art collection, comprising approximately 300 works, is valued at around $60 million.

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Leading the Herbert Lust: Collector, Scholar, Friend sale is a Giacometti bronze, Figure, demi grandeur (no. 2), conceived and cast in 1949, the year Lust and the artist first met. Part of the collection ever since, the work carries a $20-30 million estimate. Another highlight, Les Indes Galantes (est. $7-10 million), was painted by Frank Stella in 1962 and is one of just four large-scale Mitered Squares the artist created that pivotal year.

Also included in the sale are works by other canonical names of Modern and Postwar art, including Alexander Calder, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Sol LeWitt and Robert Indiana, with whom Lust shared a deep personal bond that helped shape his collection while contributing to Indiana’s career, before and after the artist’s passing. LOVE Wall from 1968 will appear in the sale with an $800,000 – 1.2 million estimate alongside Calder’s 1946 painting Pomegranate Pods (est. $500,000-700,000) and a Giacometti painting from the same year, Chaise jaune dans l’atelier (est. $400,000-600,000).

Remembering Herbert Lust

In a remembrance written for the catalog of an Alberto Giacometti exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, Lust describes himself as “a 73-year-old investment banker who still joyously works 40 hours a week but spends his evenings and weekends studying art and literature.” After transitioning from English professor to banker, Lust became a relentless collector and pursued his passion for art well into the final years of his life. He passed away in May 2026.

“My favorite memories are looking through auction catalogs together, dog-earing the pages to mark the lots that interested us, and going to auctions together,” Max Lust, his grandson, told Observer. “I was the only one who was interested at that level. We studied the market together. We were a known duet on the auction circuit. We’d meet people, and they would say, ‘Everyone knows Max and Herbert.'” According to Max, Lust was still actively collecting and going out well into his early 90s. Only in the last decade of his life, particularly after the pandemic, did he become more reclusive.

Herbert Lust was born in Chicago on October 31, 1926, and grew up on a farm in Indiana. His father died in a car........

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