A book of receipts for artworks that do not exist anchors a notable private collection at Doyle's Important Fine Art sale in New York on Wednesday 12 November. The 90-lot sale includes works from the collection of the late critic and curator Robert Pincus-Witten and his husband, textile designer Leon Hecht, appearing alongside property from other consignors including Odilon Redon, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Alexander Calder. Six works by Yves Klein feature in the sale, led by his 1959 Receipt Book for Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, Series 5.

For that project, Klein sold empty zones of artistic sensitivity in exchange for gold, handing buyers a receipt in return. The buyer could keep the receipt or burn it in a ritual meant to complete the transfer. The receipts in this book, written in French, specify 320 grams of fine gold, and the cover carries only the artist's signature in his signature deep ultramarine blue. The work asks what an artwork is, who owns it and what gives it value — a landmark experiment in twentieth-century conceptual art.

Both born in 1935, the couple grew up on the same Bronx block and met in kindergarten before reconnecting as adults, staying together for more than 50 years until Pincus-Witten's death in 2018. A longtime professor at Queens College, he wrote for Artforum in the 1960s and 1970s, and his 1971 text on Eva Hesse helped shape and name post-Minimalism. He also curated for Gagosian and directed exhibitions at C and M Arts. Hecht studied at Black Mountain College, mastered serigraphy and ran Sun Fabrics, a Broadway screen-printing loft.

Pincus-Witten believed collecting contemporary art meant supporting the cultural conversation of one's own time, and the collection reflects the couple's eye for design, medium and the cutting edge of contemporary practice. Doyle called the sale a rare chance to acquire a piece from a landmark work of conceptual art. Further property from the collection will appear in later Doyle sales, including Fine Jewelry on 13 November and Rare Books, Autographs, and Maps on 24 November.