Mary Tyler Moore’s Art Collection Hits the Block at Doyle Auctions

You can now own a piece of television star Mary Tyler Moore’s legacy when the actress’ collection hits the auction block via Doyle Auctions this month.

The auction will take place in multiple parts, starting first in Beverly Hills, where it will run from May 16 to 20, and then in New York on June 4. The sale will include more than 300 lots of memorabilia from her shows, collected artworks, and home furnishings from her residences in New York and Greenwich, Connecticut.

The pioneering actress and producer became became a symbol of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and ’70s in her hit series The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which she played Mary Richards, an independent and unmarried woman focused on her career as a news producer at the fictional WJM-TV station in Minneapolis. The show addressed controversial topics such sex outside of marriage and birth control, women dressing for themselves and demanding equal pay, and homosexuality. Prior to the series, she starred in The Dick Van Dyke Show, which followed the personal and professional life of writer Rob Petri and his wife Laura, who was played by Moore.

Moore was a philanthropist and an animal lover. In 1999, with Bernadette Peters, she founded Broadway Barks. She also advocated for diabetes research as the International Chairman for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), through which she helped raise billions of dollars. Moore died at 80 in 2017.

Among the contemporary art offerings are a pair of 1987 limestone sculptures by Mimmo Paladino, originally purchased from New York’s Sperone Westwater gallery and estimated to fetch between $50,000 and $70,000 each.

A variety of portraits of the icon are among the highlights. Two works by the American colorist Peter Max include a four-part silkscreen of Moore, estimated at $10,000–$15,000, and a single portrait of the actress that extends beyond the confines of the frame, estimated at $3,000–$5,000.

Two photographs by Annie Leibovitz, one of Moore and Dick Van Dyke dressed as clowns for a 1995 photoshoot for Vanity Fair, is listed at $4,000–$6,000 and another, taken in 2003, of Moore dressed as a magician while sitting in a director’s chair is listed at $3,000–$4,000.

Five sketches by New York caricaturist Al Hirschfeld are also among the lots, as are pre-Colombian pottery pieces, turn-of-the century weather vanes, and a Byzantine processional cross. Also included in the sale are some pieces of Moore’s jewelry, including as an 18-carat gold Tiffany cuff bracelet designed by Paloma Picasso, the daughter of Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot, that is to sell for $6,000 to $8,000.

The last time anything from Moore’s collection went to auction was a selection of 21 pieces of jewelry auctioned at Sotheby’s in December 2023. It sold for a total of $430,000. In 2018, a painting by Richard Diebenkorn that was owned by Moore and Levine sold for a whopping $22.5 million at Christie’s New York.