By Intelligent Collector Staff | January 12, 2026
More than 340 works from the Hechinger Collection will come to auction at Heritage on Jan. 28, offering an unusually focused look at how modern and contemporary artists have interpreted tools, construction and manual labor. Proceeds benefit International Arts & Artists, which has managed the collection since 2003.
John Hechinger Sr. began assembling the collection after finding the headquarters of his family’s hardware business visually uninspiring. The result grew into a collection spanning painting, sculpture, photography, prints and works on paper, united by the idea that familiar tools could become subjects and symbols for artists.
Arman’s monumental School of Fish II turns an accumulation of vise grips into an eight-foot-wide wall relief. Its exhibition history includes traveling presentations of the Hechinger Collection, and the work is recorded in the Arman Studio Archives.
Wayne Thiebaud’s Paint Cans brings the artist’s characteristic clarity and repetition to a hardware-store staple. Jacob Lawrence’s The Builders approaches construction through figures and community, while Claes Oldenburg’s Sketch for a Three-way Plug enlarges an ordinary electrical object into a Pop-inflected visual idea.
The collection’s strength is its coherence without uniformity: a common theme connects artists whose styles and intentions differ considerably.
For buyers looking for works with established exhibition histories and a meaningful single-collection context, Heritage Auctions can be the best place to buy fine art. The Hechinger sale shows how provenance and curatorial vision can add another layer to the experience of collecting individual works.
Source: Heritage Auctions press release, “Tools at Play: The Hechinger Collection Comes to Auction at Heritage” (January 12, 2026).