Ansel Adams’ Winter Sunrise and Milton Esterow Collection to Auction

Leading Heritage Auctions’ April 7 Photographs auction is a rare, medium-format mural print of Ansel Adams’ Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, California (1944).

Printed circa the mid-1960s, it waw acquired from the Carl Siembab Gallery during that decade and held in the same family collection ever since.

Also going under the hammer are works by Richard Avedon, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Wynn Bullock, Henri Cartier-Bresson, František Drtikol, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lewis Hine, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Leni Riefenstahl, Stephen Shore, and George Tice.

Highlights include:

• Robert Frank’s Cleveland, Public Park (1955), from his series The Americans
• Annie Leibovitz’s John Lennon and Yoko Ono, New York City (1980)
• Fan Ho’s Along the Tracks, Hong Kong (1955)
• Horst P. Horst’s Mainbocher Corset (1939)
• Stephen Shore’s Texas Hots, 2693 South Park Avenue, Lackawanna, New York (1977)
• Joel-Peter Witkin’s Las Meninas (1987)
• Wolfgang Tillmans’ London Morning (2023)

The sale also features a number of important photographs drawn from two distinguished private collections, including 72 from that of Milton Esterow (1928–2025), the influential journalist and longtime publisher of ARTnews. Leading this group are Laura Gilpin’s The Rio Grande Yields its Surplus to the Sea (1946), and Brassaï’s Paysage d’Hiver sur les Quais de la Seine (1937).

A dedicated, single-owner auction Artists at Work: Photographs from the Collection of Milton Esterow follows on April 8, featuring additional material from his collection and focusing on significant artists of the 20th century captured in their studios, homes and creative environments by photographers including Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Rudy Burckhardt, Robert Doisneau and André Kertész.

Among the highlights here is Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Henri Matisse with Doves, Villa Le Rêve, Vence (1944), Herbert Matter’s studies of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures, Charles Sheeler’s modernist Flower Forms (1919), and Robert Rauschenberg’s 1955 portrait of Jasper Johns in his New York studio, as well as Man Ray’s image of Marcel Duchamp created for the artist’s 1924 Monte Carlo Bonds in which Duchamp appears with shaving lather sculpted into playful horns.