Another day, another tough break for Lehman Brothers chief Dick Fuld. Fuld and his wife Kathy sold 16 drawingsat a contemporary art auction Wednesday for $13.5 million, Bloomberg reports. While that’s a nice chunk of change, it’s 10% below the low estimate made by Christies, which conducted the auction in New York.
Like so many things, art prices have been hit hard by this fall’s financial market meltdown, which was set off in part by September’s collapse of Lehman. Still, the Fulds will make a good profit on Wednesday’s sale. They got $2.2 million for Arshile Gorky’s Study for Agony 1, for instance. That is below the $2.8 million high estimate but six times the $370,000 they paid in 1996, Bloomberg reports.
Last week, Fuld set plans to leave Lehman by the end of the year, without any severance or bonus, though it seems clear that the Fulds aren’t in dire need of cash. Fuld made $22 million last year, according to the Associated Press, and Fortune’s Allan Sloan calculatedearlier this year that he had taken down $489 million in stock sale proceeds in his 14 years at the helm of what was the No. 4 U.S. brokerage firm. Bloomberg, meanwhile, reports that the Fulds are holding onto most of their collection while pruning it of some older works.
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