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

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.

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 accident when Herbert was just nine years old, after which his mother supported the family. Lust served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, but a literature course introduced him to John Keats, awakening an interest in poetry and the arts. He studied at the University of Chicago, earning a master’s degree in philosophy, before traveling to Paris in 1949 on a Fulbright scholarship.

There, he began studying comparative literature at the Sorbonne, entering the intellectual circles surrounding his professor, the philosopher Jean Wahl, whose salon brought together writers, artists and thinkers. It was at one of these luncheons that he met Alberto Giacometti. Finding himself seated next to the artist, Lust was initially unaware of his identity and assumed he was an important writer.

“Alberto was arguing with someone about André Breton. His opponent claimed that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was wrong to attack Breton for being either a fool or dishonest. I knew how much Sartre owed to the Surrealists, but just through literature,” Lust wrote in his memoir. “Here I was hearing about it on the actual battlefield. Alberto began defending Sartre. He pointed out that until Breton was drafted into World War II, he was a pacifist who saw little, if any, difference between Hitler and the democracies, since both were capitalist. All this excited me, a young American hick at last listening to literary talk in the real world. I believed that Alberto must be an important literary critic, and I was anxious to know him.”

When Giacometti asked about his background, Lust invented an elaborate story. Inspired by Julien Sorel, the ambitious protagonist of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, he claimed to be a Romanian Jew who had survived the war and escaped persecution by crossing the Carpathian Mountains barefoot. Intrigued, Giacometti invited Lust to visit his studio on Rue Hippolyte-Maindron. Once there, Lust confessed that he had invented everything, and an enduring friendship began.

Thereafter, Lust visited Giacometti repeatedly, and they discussed literature, philosophy, Surrealism and personal matters. It was through those conversations that he came to appreciate the artist’s work—as Lust admitted in a 2019 Sotheby’s interview, he initially considered the sculptures awful. Max recalls his grandfather talking about how Giacometti smoked incessantly during their visits. He also remembers another amusing story Herbert shared about finding himself in the studio with Giacometti’s brother: “Diego went through a pile of Giacometti’s drawings and said, ‘Oh, my poor brother doesn’t know how to draw.’”

Giacometti introduced Alexander Calder to his work and to Lust. In 1961, Lust traveled across the Atlantic aboard a ship with Calder and Mark Rothko, dancing with both artists’ wives during the six-day voyage, as the New York Times recalled. Lust developed his collection through an extensive network of personal relationships within the Postwar art world, both domestically and in Europe.

At their last meeting in September 1961, Giacometti gave Lust two portraits he had drawn of him, one in pencil and the other in ballpoint pen. Both drawings were in the Portland Museum of Art exhibition in 2000, alongside approximately 50 other Giacometti works from Lust’s collection. The collector became an active scholar of Giacometti’s work, compiling an annotated catalogue raisonné of the artist’s graphic oeuvre, accompanied by 15 drawings.

“Herbert was a scholar first and a collector second, and he would have insisted on that order,” Michael Feldschuh, a longtime family friend, told Observer. “He always said that the basis of collecting is scholarship. You had to know the work, the artist, and the context before you could truly own something.” According to Feldschuh, Lust didn’t collect widely or casually. “He chose a select group of artists and collected them deeply, building bodies of work rather than scattered trophies. He took the long view, and he believed a serious collection proves itself over ten years or more, not in a season.”

By 2020, his collection included more than 1,000 works, spread between his home in Greenwich, Connecticut and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, according to an ArtDaily article published that year. Around that time, he donated more than 70 photographs from his holdings to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., fulfilling a promise made years earlier. (Those works will be on view at the museum’s reopening in October, following a four-year, $68 million renovation led by architect-designer Hiroshi Sugimoto.) It was hardly his only donation: in the early 2000s, he also donated approximately 200 Giacometti-related works to the Tel Aviv Museum, including prints, drawings and photographs.

When we spoke, Max Lust recalled that his grandfather was fascinated rather than disapproving of the extraordinary rise in prices for art and other collectibles. After all, he was among the fortunate collectors who had purchased a Giacometti bronze for something like $100,000 in the 1970s, only to see works of that caliber climb into the eight digits a few decades later: “He was always astounded by how the art market kept growing. He talked about how they kept printing more and more money and how collectibles kept going up in value.”

Lust even wrote a book on the subject, A Dozen Principles for Art Investment, published in 1969 by Station Hill Press. His central argument was that exceptional quality should take precedence over quantity when acquiring art. He maintained that buying one outstanding work was a better investment than acquiring 10 merely good works. “His advice never changed: buy the highest quality object you can afford, and then hold on to it,” Feldschuh confirmed.

Yet this was not necessarily a principle he always followed in his own collecting. Lust feverishly championed overlooked artists including Hans Bellmer, Mary Bauermeister and Enrico Baj, as well as the once enormously popular but notoriously difficult Greek artist Chryssa and the still lesser-known photographer Carlotta Corpron.

”Herbert was drawn to artists who defied convention and shocked bourgeois taste,” Feldschuh added, noting how, for Lust, originality mattered more than polish or popularity. “If a work upset people, that didn’t put him off. It made him instantly curious. He wanted to understand what it was about the work that provoked such a reaction, because he believed that discomfort often pointed to something genuinely new. That curiosity, backed by real study, was what gave his eye its edge. He also had a wonderful way of describing the emotional arc of collecting: the pain comes when you pay for a piece, and the pleasure lasts a lifetime.”

Bellmer’s Jointure de boules (La Poupée) will go on the block at Christie’s with a $1.5-2 million estimate; it’s one of the artist’s largest and most important 1930s constructions in private hands and a signature example of the darker eroticism that defined the Surrealist movement. One funny memory Max shared involved a very explicit, shocking erotic drawing by Bellmer that was hanging in one of the rooms. “My grandfather suddenly took it off the wall, turned it around so the image faced the wall, leaned it there and said, ‘Whatever you guys do, don’t look at this.’ Then he walked out of the room. We were about 10 or 11, or perhaps younger, and of course, we went to look at it.”

According to Max, his grandfather was curious until the very end and attentive to younger names emerging in contemporary art. Through Max’s interest in Ryan McGinness, they acquired one of his paintings, as well as works by Sigalit Landau and Michal Rovner. Further demonstrating how his passion and curiosity often defied conventional investment logic, Max recalled his grandfather’s fondness for what he called “petites trésors”—little treasures—including prints and lower-priced works. At one nearly empty summer sale, they scored several Robert Indiana prints because they were literally the only people bidding: “The room was so empty that a mosquito was circling, and you could hear it flying around. He ended up buying a bunch of prints. He loved prints.”

One story Feldschuh shared with Observer did, in fact, involve a print—specifically a rare print by Joel-Peter Witkin. “He had been hunting for it for a long time, and he told me how he finally tracked down one of the very few impressions available. He was thrilled, brought it home, and went to put it away in his print drawer. That’s when he discovered why it had been so hard to find: he had bought the only other remaining print 15 years earlier. He told the story with great delight, and it captured him perfectly. He had such a sharp eye that he’d recognized the same great work twice, 15 years apart.”

In recent years, Max assisted his grandfather in managing and organizing his collection and planning for its future alongside Feldschuh. The consignment ultimately went to Christie’s in collaboration with The Fine Art Group, thanks to the longstanding relationship the estate had developed with Alejandra Rossetti, who helped manage Lust’s Sotheby’s account during her 27 years at the auction house.

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