City Attracts Top Auction Gallery
Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, one of the top such galleries in the country, plans to open a branch in Milwaukee on East Mason Street, adding to the artsy ambience of that area of town. Hindman is based in Chicago and also opened a branch in Naples, Fla. This will be the third location for the auction gallery.
Milwaukee has been good to Hindman. In 1991, her auction gallery made worldwide headlines when she sold a previously unknown Van Gogh painting found in a Bayside farmhouse for $1.43 million. “It was a record for Chicago, or perhaps anywhere in the U.S. outside of Manhattan,” news reports said.
Now Hindman is banking on Milwaukee as a good place for a satellite facility. She is negotiating a lease with developer Joel Lee for space at 414 E. Mason St.
“We’ve always done a lot of business in Milwaukee,” Hindman says. “It is an old, old city, and there are other old, old cities in Wisconsin … It’s a wonderful city, I like going there. Especially with Schrager no longer in business, I thought it would be time, and I’m negotiating a lease now.” (Schrager Auction Galleries closed last May after more than a half century in business, leaving a void in the marketplace.)
Hindman cites the breadth of Milwaukee’s collections and the thousands of once-invisible, ordinary folks with extraordinary possessions that have recently come to light thanks to cultural phenomena such as E-Bay, Antiques Roadshow and even her own television appearances.
Her firm is the go-to choice when institutions like the Milwaukee Art Museum and Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art choose to deaccession their holdings.
“Do you know (Haggerty Director) Wally Mason?” Hindman asks. “I love him!”
An upcoming sale at Hindman will feature many paintings and prints collected by the late Peg Bradley. “They are from the Garden,” Hindman says, referring to what is now the Lynden Sculpture Garden in River Hills (but the works are from the old house on the grounds). The sale will benefit the garden.
Hindman got her start with Sotheby’s in the late ‘70s as an assistant earning $8,700 a year and started her own auction house in 1982. She found a niche with mid-level collectors and sellers, like the Van Gogh owners. Still anonymous, they are described only as an upper middle class, retired suburban couple who inherited a still life of flowers from a relative who had immigrated to Milwaukee from Switzerland in the ‘40s. (That probably narrows it down to thousands of couples in the metro area.)
Hindman’s instincts for showmanship, including a sale held at Comiskey Park, helped bring her firm attention and business. It was the largest house in Chicago and fifth-largest in the nation when she sold it to Sotheby’s in 1997.
Sotheby’s wanted to court the middle class market, but the effort did not succeed. So Hindman reopened the business under her name when the contract with Sotheby’s expired in 2003.
But why the bricks-and-mortar approach in the era of electronic auctions? Hindman says her business model integrates the best of the old-school and the new. An increasing number of her auction sales result from electronic bids. But a physical presence, along with a professional staff that can better evaluate items and an appraisal service and physical showroom offer an inducement to collectors and sellers.
Hindman seems eager to embrace the city’s downtown. Her space would be across the street from the Pfister and Metro hotels, and on the same block as the building that houses George Watts & Son and DeLind Fine Arts.
“I love Watts and I love DeLind!,” she exclaims. “The synergy is wonderful – we’re by the Pfister – there are many synergies. We weren’t planning on announcing this until July. But now that you know, we hope to open in September with a big party.”
Hindman’s arrival is good news to Bill DeLind. “I see this as a big plus for me and look forward to having them as neighbors,” he says.
DeLind says Hindman visited his gallery and also met with Sam Watts. “She spoke of perhaps some sort of joint festive party … a ‘welcome to the neighborhood party,’” De Lind said. He added that Hindman’s move here “is prompted by the closing of Schrager and the large amount of business she gets from Milwaukee, both buying and selling.”