Lehman art sale fetches huge prices

(breakingviews.com) -- A year ago, investors ran screaming from Lehman Brothers' assets as the investment bank crumbled. On Sunday, they could barely squeeze in for an auction of the firm's art collection in Philadelphia. As morbid as it sounds, death sometimes creates value for the living.

Indeed, the sale of more than 200 pictures from Lehman's walls attracted a standing-room-only crowd of 400 at Freeman's auction house in Philadelphia. The firm's online platform was overloaded too, with Internet audio connections failing. But that did nothing to cool the apparent fever to own a piece of Lehman.

The lots brought in nearly twice their estimated take of around $750,000, with some pieces fetching multiples of their published estimates. It wasn't surprising that Georges Schreiber's oil rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge found a buyer. That the relatively insignificant work sold for five times its lower estimate, including gavel fees, was.

Of course, it only proves the estimates -- like those issued by Wall Street analysts who rated Lehman shares a "buy" in August 2008 -- were faulty. And therein lays the appeal of the Lehman auction. No appraiser can accurately assess the emotional value a piece of art will command due to its historical provenance.

The 1945 Schreiber portrait is a prime example. The painting hung on the wall in Lehman's New York boardroom. In a sense then, owning this particular "Brooklyn Bridge" is the closest almost anyone will come to an inside view of one of history's greatest financial collapses.