The Tastemakers
March 2008
Great Collectors of
Our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945
By James Stourton
Scala, $75
The history of art is often written as though it were only a history of artists and their works, but that approach leaves out what happens on the other side of the equation, in the eye and mind of the beholder. We also need the history of the appreciation and acquisition of artworks—the history of taste.
James Stourton, chairman of Sotheby’s U.K., makes it very clear in this book that in writing about the great collectors he is dealing with the history of taste, not with that of the art market. "Typically a collector is buying a generation ahead of the market," he writes. "The history of the art market is written when great collectors sell rather than buy." For obvious reasons, that claim is counterintuitive in today’s art world, but Stourton decided—perversely or not, depending upon your point of view—to omit American collecting during and since the art boom of the 1980s. This he calls "a chapter which cannot yet be written," partly because the story is not over and partly because the gentlemanly author refrained from pestering collectors who are already blinking in the glare of the media klieg lights. In any case, his choices are more interesting. Stourton is the first writer to tackle the subject seriously since 1963, when the great Cubist collector and scholar Douglas Cooper edited Great Private Collections, and although some of the same names are here, the new book adds immeasurably to our understanding.
Many of the 130 collectors (actually 129, plus one institution, the Hallmark Photographic Collection) profiled in this massively ambitious volume did far more than simply assemble wonderful treasure-hoards. In the 1940s and ’50s, the Anglo-Irish art historian Denis Mahon virtually single-handedly resurrected the appreciation of Italian Seicento painting. Armed with family money ultimately derived from the brewing trade (Guinness being not only good for you but good for art), he shopped all over Europe for works by Guercino (his specialty), Domenichino and Guido Reni, buying before the prices started to rise. In 1954 he had a group of Renis restored, and when they came back a museum chief in Bologna exclaimed, "Here we have a new artist!" In 1997, Mahon loaned his entire collection to various museums in Britain, though he has only sold three paintings in his entire life.
Another important benefactor-collector, though one of far greater wealth, was Paul Mellon, who started out buying modernist works under the tutelage of Museum of Modern Art curator Alfred Barr and through a circuitous journey (involving psychoanalysis with Carl Jung, among other influences) ended up finding his spiritual home in 18th-century England. His two heroes were William Blake and George Stubbs—opposite poles of the British soul. His collecting in the field of English painting, Stourton observes, "expressed very differently and in an entirely original manner" a taste that "was the creation in market terms of Lord Duveen" and by Mellon’s day had waned almost to non-existence.
Not everyone in this book is rich. Stourton has a soft spot for collectors of no particular means but possessed of a good eye, a dream and the luck to be in the right place at the right time. Notable among them is Pierre Rosenberg, the director of the Louvre, who haunted flea markets and the Drouot auctions in search of the petits maîtres he loves so much. Rosenberg, whose Paris apartment is cluttered with "small, rather dark paintings of frequently obscure subjects and unknown authorship," may be an addict but is also making a major contribution to scholarship. Another such collector is George Costakis, a Greek who grew up in the Soviet Union and assembled an impressive Russian avant-garde collection on his modest salary as an employee of the Canadian embassy in Moscow. Costakis, who sold the family car without telling his wife in order to buy a Kandinsky, laid down a set of maxims, including, "A real collector must feel like a millionaire even if he is penniless. Money must never stand in his way." Another flea market scavenger was Picasso, who liked to say with a snarl, "Je ne suis pas collectionneur." Most of his African carvings were mediocre, according to Stourton, which the artist justified by saying, "You don’t need masterpieces to get the idea." André Breton was a pioneer tribal collector whose low-cost acquisitions eventually left him with hardly any room to move around in his apartment.
The well-known heavy hitters are here, too, of course—Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, any number of Rothschilds, David Rockefeller, Victor and Sally Ganz, the Sculls, the Tremaines and so forth—but Stourton has the access and the cultural depth, not to mention the writing skill, to take us further into their stories than journalists are usually able to go. Many of his profiles include interviews, and some of the subjects—for example, the antiquities collector George Ortiz—are remarkably eloquent and even philosophical. The anecdotes and gossip items are priceless. There was the time word got out among the dealers on 57th Street that Paul Mellon was coming. He was shown a Renoir, said he wasn’t sure whether he wanted it or not, and later in the day went to another dealer, who showed him the very same picture. The secretive Stavros Niarchos once visited an exhibition of Orientalist paintings at the Fine Art Society in London and said he wanted to buy the whole thing. On being told that some had already been sold, he replied, "I always regard red spots as meaning negotiate."
By James Stourton
Scala, $75
The history of art is often written as though it were only a history of artists and their works, but that approach leaves out what happens on the other side of the equation, in the eye and mind of the beholder. We also need the history of the appreciation and acquisition of artworks—the history of taste.
James Stourton, chairman of Sotheby’s U.K., makes it very clear in this book that in writing about the great collectors he is dealing with the history of taste, not with that of the art market. "Typically a collector is buying a generation ahead of the market," he writes. "The history of the art market is written when great collectors sell rather than buy." For obvious reasons, that claim is counterintuitive in today’s art world, but Stourton decided—perversely or not, depending upon your point of view—to omit American collecting during and since the art boom of the 1980s. This he calls "a chapter which cannot yet be written," partly because the story is not over and partly because the gentlemanly author refrained from pestering collectors who are already blinking in the glare of the media klieg lights. In any case, his choices are more interesting. Stourton is the first writer to tackle the subject seriously since 1963, when the great Cubist collector and scholar Douglas Cooper edited Great Private Collections, and although some of the same names are here, the new book adds immeasurably to our understanding.
Many of the 130 collectors (actually 129, plus one institution, the Hallmark Photographic Collection) profiled in this massively ambitious volume did far more than simply assemble wonderful treasure-hoards. In the 1940s and ’50s, the Anglo-Irish art historian Denis Mahon virtually single-handedly resurrected the appreciation of Italian Seicento painting. Armed with family money ultimately derived from the brewing trade (Guinness being not only good for you but good for art), he shopped all over Europe for works by Guercino (his specialty), Domenichino and Guido Reni, buying before the prices started to rise. In 1954 he had a group of Renis restored, and when they came back a museum chief in Bologna exclaimed, "Here we have a new artist!" In 1997, Mahon loaned his entire collection to various museums in Britain, though he has only sold three paintings in his entire life.
Another important benefactor-collector, though one of far greater wealth, was Paul Mellon, who started out buying modernist works under the tutelage of Museum of Modern Art curator Alfred Barr and through a circuitous journey (involving psychoanalysis with Carl Jung, among other influences) ended up finding his spiritual home in 18th-century England. His two heroes were William Blake and George Stubbs—opposite poles of the British soul. His collecting in the field of English painting, Stourton observes, "expressed very differently and in an entirely original manner" a taste that "was the creation in market terms of Lord Duveen" and by Mellon’s day had waned almost to non-existence.
Not everyone in this book is rich. Stourton has a soft spot for collectors of no particular means but possessed of a good eye, a dream and the luck to be in the right place at the right time. Notable among them is Pierre Rosenberg, the director of the Louvre, who haunted flea markets and the Drouot auctions in search of the petits maîtres he loves so much. Rosenberg, whose Paris apartment is cluttered with "small, rather dark paintings of frequently obscure subjects and unknown authorship," may be an addict but is also making a major contribution to scholarship. Another such collector is George Costakis, a Greek who grew up in the Soviet Union and assembled an impressive Russian avant-garde collection on his modest salary as an employee of the Canadian embassy in Moscow. Costakis, who sold the family car without telling his wife in order to buy a Kandinsky, laid down a set of maxims, including, "A real collector must feel like a millionaire even if he is penniless. Money must never stand in his way." Another flea market scavenger was Picasso, who liked to say with a snarl, "Je ne suis pas collectionneur." Most of his African carvings were mediocre, according to Stourton, which the artist justified by saying, "You don’t need masterpieces to get the idea." André Breton was a pioneer tribal collector whose low-cost acquisitions eventually left him with hardly any room to move around in his apartment.
The well-known heavy hitters are here, too, of course—Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, any number of Rothschilds, David Rockefeller, Victor and Sally Ganz, the Sculls, the Tremaines and so forth—but Stourton has the access and the cultural depth, not to mention the writing skill, to take us further into their stories than journalists are usually able to go. Many of his profiles include interviews, and some of the subjects—for example, the antiquities collector George Ortiz—are remarkably eloquent and even philosophical. The anecdotes and gossip items are priceless. There was the time word got out among the dealers on 57th Street that Paul Mellon was coming. He was shown a Renoir, said he wasn’t sure whether he wanted it or not, and later in the day went to another dealer, who showed him the very same picture. The secretive Stavros Niarchos once visited an exhibition of Orientalist paintings at the Fine Art Society in London and said he wanted to buy the whole thing. On being told that some had already been sold, he replied, "I always regard red spots as meaning negotiate."
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