Sotheby’s to Auction Rare Treasures from Rolf & Margit Weinberg Collection, Headlined by $7M Cézanne Portrait

This spring, Sotheby’s will unveil a remarkable trove of modern masterpieces as it prepares to auction works from the estate of renowned Swiss collectors Rolf and Margit Weinberg. The highly anticipated sale, titled Modern Perspectives: The Collection of Rolf & Margit Weinberg, will take place during Sotheby’s Modern Evening Sale in New York on May 13.

Described by Sotheby’s as a visionary couple who “assembled one of Europe’s most distinguished collections over the past 50 years,” the Weinbergs curated an extraordinary assembly of late 19th- and early 20th-century art. The sale will feature works by celebrated artists including Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, Henri Matisse, and Wassily Kandinsky.

Leading the collection is Paul Cézanne’s Portrait de Madame Cézanne (circa 1877), an emotionally complex and rare depiction of the artist’s wife, Hortense Fiquet. With an estimated value of up to $7 million, the painting is one of only 29 portraits of Madame Cézanne, most of which reside in museum collections.

Henri Matisse’s bold and colorful Le Bras (1938) is another standout, expected to fetch as much as $6 million. Sotheby’s describes it as “an exquisite distillation” of Matisse’s Nice period, prefiguring the stylistic innovations of his late-career cut-outs.

Other highlights include Egon Schiele’s evocative Gewitterberg (Kapelle auf dem Kreuzberg bei Krumau) (1910) and Kandinsky’s seminal Anfang (Beginning) (1925), both estimated between $2 million and $3 million.

“This is a cultural legacy of collecting in the purest sense,” said Lisa Dennison, Sotheby’s Americas chairman. “It is rare to encounter a collection so meticulously assembled across decades, with such connoisseurship and evolving taste.”

The sale also marks a rare public appearance for many of these works, not widely seen since the Weinberg collection’s 1996–1997 European museum tour, From El Greco to Mondrian. A public viewing will be held at Sotheby’s New York galleries beginning May 2.

“The dialogues created between these works—between Cézanne and Matisse, Schiele and Kandinsky—tell a broader story of modernism’s evolution,” said Nick Deimel, Sotheby’s SVP of Modern Art. “This collection is a testament to a lifetime of passion, scholarship, and commitment to the arts.”