Efforts to reach GPS for comment were unsuccessful, but the Gagosian Gallery had prepared a written statement trumpeting its success: “The substantial private sales made recently from the Sonnabend collection clearly convey the important message to collectors and institutions that some private galleries, such as Gagosian, can more effectively handle transactions of this scale than their auction counterparts.”

The New York dealer David Zwirner agrees. “As you can see from the Sonnabend deal, the private market has many strengths,” he says. The heirs “were sending signals out to the community: ‘Make us offers.’ And the private dealers beat out the auction houses.”

Zwirner himself was in a similar position recently. This past March, his eponymous gallery—along with affiliates Hauser & Wirth, of London and Zurich, and Zwirner & Wirth, of New York and Zurich—went toe-to-toe with Sotheby’s for the Pop and Conceptual artworks of the German collectors Helga and Walther Lauff, whose complete holdings are reportedly worth €400 million ($635 million). In the end, the auction house and the dealers split the property.

Others in the art world share Gagosian’s and Zwirner’s enthusiasm. “It is nice to know the market can be bigger than the duopoly of Christie’s and Sotheby’s,” says Mary Hoeveler, the former managing director of Citigroup’s Art Advisory Service, in New York. “There are other ways to go.”

Still the Sonnabend coup left out many significant players, including the paper magnate Peter Brant. The Greenwich, Connecticut, collector made some of his first purchases in the 1960s from Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, in Paris, including a Warhol “Disaster” painting for which he paid $35,000 in 1969. “I was not given the opportunity to buy anything,” laments Brant, “but you have to give credit to the dealers who put it together and to the collectors who made up part of the group.”

The auction houses, of course, don’t see it quite that way. As one high-ranking specialist puts it, “The number of disappointed people who have spoken to us about not having the opportunity to buy is an indication of what would have happened if you had gotten the billionaire titans bidding against each other.”

George Sutton, a stock market analyst with the Minneapolis-based firm Craig Hallum Capital who tracks Sotheby’s shares, sees wider consequences. “Anytime a private sale happens, it’s a concern” for the investment community, he says. “It’s a surprise and a disappointment for the auction market—and a bit of a revenge for dealers.”

"Sonnabend Goes Private" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.