SOTHEBY’S TO OFFER The Collection of Douglas S. Cramer: Renowned Hollywood Producer Behind The Brady Bunch, Dynasty, Star Trek, And Many More Legendary TV Shows Highlighted by Roy Lichtenstein’s Two Paintings: Craig...

A Masterful Example of the Artist’s Signature Pop Idiom Starring in the Contemporary Art Evening Auction this November Estimate $12/18 Million

More Than 130 Works from the Cramer Collection Will Feature Across Three Auctions this Fall

NEW YORK, 7 October 2021 – This November, works from the collection of esteemed art collector and prescient television producer Douglas S. Cramer will highlight Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction in New York. Known for producing many of the most iconic and successful television shows in history, such as The Brady Bunch, Star Trek, Wonder Woman, and Dynasty, Cramer was a passionate collector, generous Museum Trustee and extraordinary visionary who assembled a singular collection of contemporary art spanning the great masters of 20th century Post-War to artists still at the height of their practice today, creating a fascinating dialogue across media, styles, and generations. Featuring works by Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Cecily Brown, Ellsworth Kelly, and more, the selection is crowned by Lichtenstein’s Two Paintings: Craig... from 1983 (estimate $12/18 million) – the ultimate testament to the artist’s career-long exploration of his signature Pop idiom, and a pioneering investigation into the form, content, and meaning of contemporary art.

Highlights from the collection will be on public view in Hong Kong today through 11 October, followed by London from 22 – 25 October, and Los Angeles from 28 – 31 October before returning to New York ahead of the Contemporary Evening Auction on 18 November.

Additional works from the collection will be on offer in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Day auction this November, followed by a dedicated, online auction from 9 – 17 December.

DOUGLAS S. CRAMER
After beginning his television career at ABC Television and 20th Century Fox, Douglas S. Cramer subsequently became head of production for Paramount Television. A prophetic cultural producer of television, Cramer produced iconic shows such as Star Trek, The Brady Bunch, Mission: Impossible and many more, leaving an indelible stamp on an a golden era of television. Together with Aaron Spelling, Cramer would later produce Dynasty, one of the most successful and popular primetime programs of the 1980s. Cramer found a meditative alternative to his frenetic workday producing hit television shows in collecting art and the tranquility of the still image. As he told The New York Times in a 1993 interview, “There’s something wonderful in how the art is, well, frozen. At work, I’ll spend two or three or four hours looking at film, at moving images. But when I come home, the images stop”. The refuge he found in art eventually became his singular passion, retiring from television to focus on his collection with his beloved husband Hugh Bush.

Cramer became one of the founders of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, a member of the board and head of the important Painting and Sculpture Committee for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and donated funds and major artworks to many prominent institutions, including MOMA, The Whitney Museum, MOCA LA, and the Tate Modern. His major gifts to museums include Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Hollywood Africans from 1983 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Ellsworth Kelly’s Three Panels: Orange, Dark Gray, Green from 1986 to the Museum of Modern Art and Roy Lichtenstein’s Interior with Waterlilies from 1991 to the Tate Gallery of Modern Art.

THE COLLECTION OF DOUGLAS S. CRAMER
A discerning and generous connoisseur, Cramer built an astounding collection of some of the greatest masterworks of his generation. Having produced more than 3,000 hours of televised entertainment, Cramer built an inimitable career on his abiding passion for telling stories. This talent for storytelling is evident throughout Cramer’s collection – ever attuned to the world around him and with a prescient recognition of the zeitgeist, Cramer developed a keen interest in the art of his time and his collection evolved over the years to reflect the changing story of the moment. Beginning in the early 1960s with an interest in prints and drawings by modern masters, Cramer’s confidence in his own eye grew rapidly, and he soon began seeking out work by a younger generation of talent including Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jasper Johns – all of whom he came to know personally. Lichtenstein in particular proved to have a lasting influence on Cramer’s own creative process, and the artist’s signature pop style even inspired the trademark pop-art graphics used on the Batman series. Cramer even used his commissioning patronage to convince Andy Warhol to make a guest appearance on The Love Boat.

Never one to cling to the sentimentality of the past, Cramer did not limit his collecting passion to the art of his peers, but continued to support new generations of artists for over 50 years. Works by Cecily Brown are strongly represented in the collection by several masterworks of the 1990s and early 2000s, and works by other younger artists such as Elizabeth Peyton, Mark Grotjahn, and Lisa Yuskavage complement an overarching theme of the tensions between abstraction and figuration. While every work is a veritable archetype of each artist’s unique and distinctive practice, the collection presents a sophisticated, insightful narrative of the conceptual and aesthetic developments throughout 20th century mark-making.