Rare ‘Migrant Mother’ and 200 20th-century photographs: interior designer Vicente Wolf’s collection heads to auction at Christie’s

An extraordinary collection of 200 photographs belonging to internationally renowned interior designer Vicente Wolf will go to auction at Christie’s in New York on October 22, 2026, in a two-part sale — a live auction and an online auction, as PetaPixel reports.

The collection, assembled by Wolf over nearly five decades, spans a wide range of subjects, genres, movements and periods, with works by some of the most influential European and American photographers of the 20th century. His passion for collecting began, according to PetaPixel, with advice from famed photographer Richard Avedon and continued for decades.

Of particular note is the rarest piece in the collection: a rare print of Dorothea Lange’s famous 1936 photograph “Migrant Mother.” Wolf’s print shows the mother’s thumb — a detail Lange later removed from other versions — revealing what the original of this iconic 20th-century American photograph looked like. Wolf says he searched long for the right Lange print and, when he saw that “Migrant Mother” was coming to auction, realized he had never seen the mother’s finger in the photograph — discovering that Lange had removed it after the earliest prints.

The collection also features names such as Alexander Rodchenko, Constantin Brâncuși, Man Ray, Lee Miller, Diane Arbus, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Francesca Woodman and Avedon, as well as an anonymous press print of Marilyn Monroe, hand-masked as a mock-up for the first cover of Playboy magazine in 1953.

The two-part auction will be held at Christie’s, New York, on October 22, 2026.