Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House

Courtesy Christie's

The Palm Springs home designed by Richard Neutra for department-store tycoon Edgar Kaufmann Sr. is just as striking now as when it was built.

Thomas Loof

This month's contemporary art evening sale at Christie's New York features Roy Lichtenstein's "Ball of Twine" (1963), which here leans against the wall of another lot, Richard Neutra's 1946 Kaufmann House.

IMPRESSIONIST/ MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART

IT'S AN ALL-STAR LINEUP FOR THE BIG SPRING AUCTIONS. >

Richard Joseph Neutra Frank Lloyd Wright The Week That Was (May 16 – 23, 2008) Sale of Neutra House Falls Through Wright to Auction Louis Kahn Landmark Spectacular Results at Christie’s Contemporary Sale Home, Sweet Home Last-Ditch Effort to Save Wright's Ennis House

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The auction of Richard Neutra’s 1946 Kaufmann House, one of the most important examples of International Style architecture in the United States and the only one still in private hands, would be news under any circumstances. What makes it headlineworthy is that the structure is being offered not in a design sale—as were Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, which sold for $7.5 million at Sotheby’s New York in December 2003, and Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale, which brought $5 million at Christie’s New York in June 2007—but in a contemporary one.

This is the first time that Christie’s has placed architecture in such a context, but according to Joshua Holdeman, head of the 20th-century decorative art and design department, the choice was logical. “With an object like this, that people respond to in a visceral way, the decision to put it into the evening art sale indicates our belief that it is as important as the other objects on offer,” he says.

Born in Vienna, Neutra emigrated in 1923 to California, where he became celebrated for rigorously geometric but airy structures that represented a West Coast variation on the midcentury modern residence. Jutting from a hilltop in Palm Springs, the Kaufmann House, a construction of horizontal planes and sliding glass walls, was built for the family of Edgar Kaufmann Sr., the Pittsburgh department-store tycoon, who had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design Fallingwater, in rural Pennsylvania, a decade earlier. (His son, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., became the first architecture and design curator of the Museum of Modern Art.)

After Kaufmann Sr.’s death, in 1955, the residence changed owners several times, undergoing unfortunate renovations. It was rescued in 1992 by Bret and Beth Harris, who purchased it for about $1.5 million and undertook a painstaking and costly restoration. Now divorcing, the Harrises are reluctantly putting the property up for sale.

"Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.