This week, Christie’s announced it will sell what is perhaps the most important collection of minimalist art to appear at auction since 2006, when the Judd Foundation sold 35 sculptures to raise $20 million. The Henry S. McNeil Jr. collection will be sold in an evening sale in New York this May, featuring 12 lots from artists like Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd, plus additional work in design and day sales. The whole collection has a combined presale estimate of $30 million, and includes seminal works like a copper Judd stack lined with red Plexiglas, estimated at $10 million, and Flavin’s first fluorescent-light work, which is estimated at $1.5 million.

Interest in minimalist art has reached something of a nadir in recent years. For those already skeptical of “modern art,” the work can come off as coolly intellectual and needlessly provocative, and sometimes appear to be a parody of itself. Who doesn’t struggle to see the art in pencil lines drawn on a wall—or white bricks arranged in a neat stack? Indeed, a quick check of auction prices shows that the top price paid for a work by Donald Judd came a dozen years ago. The same is true of Dan Flavin. Carl Andre’s work had a run at auction in 2019, and again in 2021, but none of those sales cracked the $3 million mark. For Sol LeWitt, whose work can often be little more than instructions for executing wall drawings, there was a market pop three years ago that doubled his top price all the way to $1.6 million.

But McNeil, who died last year at the age of 81, loved and lived with his art in an 8,800-square-foot townhouse off Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. The son of the inventor of Tylenol, he lived a querulous life. He battled with his parents, with his adult children from a previous marriage, and even with an addiction to cocaine. Although his mother cut him out of the family fortune when she died nearly three decades ago, she left him a small bequest, which set off an epic legal battle with his siblings. However, he used money he had inherited earlier, in a trust, to build a substantial real estate portfolio in Pennsylvania.

McNeil raised his two children, Calder and Cole, in the Rittenhouse Square townhouse alongside his exceptional collection of minimalist art. And Christie’s made the smart decision to turn that curious situation into a selling point. Last week, they invited a stream of art advisors, collectors, and folks like me, who were simply interested to see what it meant to live with a peerless collection of minimalist art, to tour McNeil’s home.

One curious thing about the art market is that we often see a collector’s art, but don’t often see how they actually live with it. On occasion, the auction houses will re-create the setting with improved lighting and editing, or present the public with shelter-magazine-style pictures of the collectors’ homes. Many collectors will also create spaces that are purpose-built to show off their collections; it’s not uncommon to go to a collector’s home and find a laminated checklist of the art on the walls for easy reference.