Sotheby's to sell Ted and Ruth Baum collection, reportedly worth over US$100m

What happened

Sotheby's is to auction the art collection of TV figure Ted Baum and his wife Ruth, which The Art Insider put at more than US$100m. The Art Insider reported the plan on 9 October 2026, and an Artnet News headline carried a US$100m figure for the collection.

The Art Insider said Ted Baum died in 2021 and Ruth Baum about two months before its report.

The collection runs to more than 130 works, although The Art Insider said not all of them have been evaluated. About two dozen works are due to be offered at Sotheby's on 16 November 2026, with more sold the following day.

The Art Insider described the rest, an unknown number, as being auctioned sporadically over the next year at various Sotheby's locations.

The Art Insider said a Mark Rothko painting is likely to lead the November auction, with an estimate of US$10m to US$15m. It gave an Ed Ruscha painting the same range, and put Joan Mitchell's 1960 work Green Book of Barbara Guest at US$12m.

It named Roy Lichtenstein and Lucio Fontana among the other artists in the collection.

The same report said the collection will also travel and be displayed in London, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Paris and New York. It added that a gallery named for the couple at the Norton Museum of Art already displays a fraction of the collection.

The sources we read did not say which sale each work sits in, nor whether the estimates include the buyer's premium (the auction house's fee on top of the hammer price). They did not describe how the consignment was agreed, so we do not report on it.

No sale has yet taken place, and we could not check the total against a Sotheby's page. The US$100m figure is a valuation, not a result.