Phoenix values its collection of Israeli art at $23m

Phoenix Insurance, seeking to sell its Israeli art, says the collection is worth as much as $23 million.

Lucien Krief's auction house Matsart had evaluated it at $18 million, while Sotheby's had said it was worth $12 million.

	A work by Yair Garbuz, which is part of the Phoenix collection.

Negotiations have been going on for several months, and Matsart offered the highest external valuation. Talks between Krief and Phoenix CEO Eyal Lapidot halted when the insurance company said the collection was worth $23 million.

The Phoenix collection includes 1,300 works by more than 200 Israeli artists. It is considered one of the most important collections of Israeli art, along with the Gaby and Ami Brown collection, from which dozens of pieces have been sold at recent public auctions conducted by Tirosh.

Krief, the owner of the Lucien Krief Gallery in Jerusalem, says the Phoenix collection is more important than the Brown, due to the artists whose work it contains and the large number of works.

"There are enough works by each individual artist to create wide-ranging one-person exhibitions," Krief says. "They have a huge collection of [works by the late painter Avigdor] Arikha in quantities we've never seen."

The collection includes large numbers of works by painters Reuven Rubin, Mordecai Ardon, Yehezkel Streichman and Joseph Zaritsky. Other artists represented are Lea Nikel, Yitzhak Danziger, Yair Garbuz, Moshe Gershoni, Rafi Lavie, Pinchas Cohen-Gan, Micha Ullman, Nahum Tevet and Menashe Kadishman.

Low prices

The collection was established by Yosef Hahami in the beginning of the 1970s, who started acquiring work by internationally known artists, including Picasso, Van Gogh and Manet, for low prices. When prices in the international market rose, Hachami began to collect Israeli art and developed personal relationships with many artists, some of whom even painted him (Arikha, Michael Gross, Uri Lipschitz and Ofer Lalush ).

The Phoenix collection was first displayed in 1999, at an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. In 2002, Hahami and his sister sold their controlling interest in the insurance company, including the art collection, for $312 million.

The new owners of the collection sold it in 2006 to businessman Yitzhak Tshuva, who immediately sold dozens of paintings for NIS 30 million. In 2008 he sold more pieces for NIS 7.5 million.

Dov Hazan, owner and director of the Tirosh auction house, said yesterday, "Hachami felt a kind of national responsibility to build a broad collection representative of Israeli art from the end of the 19th century onward, and this is what motivated his choices, as opposed to the Brown collection, which was chosen in keeping with an individual collector's tastes."

Hazan said the reason the company may be trying to sell the collection as a whole - worth only 0.5% of the funds Phoenix manages - is the sale of the building where the collection is stored on Tel Aviv's Rakevet Street.

Both Phoenix and Sotheby's declined to comment.

Noam Barr contributed to this report.