She’s blonde and beautiful, with a reputation for rubbing people up the wrong way. So can the French-Canadian Louise MacBain fulfil her dream: to transform the British art world? By Giles Hattersley
The hazel eyes that dart with fear, the sudden bursts of sweetness and laughter, the urge to use 57 words when three will do, to say nothing of reports that she stepped out with Prince Andrew. On occasion, this art-world mogul also exhibits toxic sang-froid, as on the sweltering day we meet in the cafe of an organic supermarket in Notting Hill, west London. The room is baking, but MacBain is wearing a wool blazer and a caramel pashmina wrapped twice around her swan neck. As the thermostat creeps above 30C, the Québecois beauty sips from a large mug of piping-hot latte, but her brow never moistens and her lip gloss stays put.
As I’m pondering whether the blood of the 25th richest woman in Britain (£200m, according to The Sunday Times Rich List) literally runs cold, she confirms it certainly does metaphorically. Straightening her back, she announces that when she opens her new arts institute in London this October, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to bus in the poor people so they can see the exhibitions.”
This is unfortunate, because up to this point we had been motoring along nicely. Yes, she had been a little pretentious at times. Certainly she had dropped so many names (Calvin Klein… Renée Fleming… Vladimir Putin…) that I should have asked the waiter for a dustpan and brush. She was fun, though, and more sincere than I’d been led to believe by some of her acquaintances. But – the poor people? What is the would-be Saatchi envisaging, I wonder? These so-called poor, awestruck at the sight of a James Turrell installation or an Antony Gormley sculpture? Will MacBain look on, saintlike, as poverty and social disease melt away in the face of spot paintings? Probably. After all, this is a woman who once extolled the benefits of opera for the blighted children of Sudan.
For those wondering who this unusual creature is, MacBain is a 47-year-old French-Canadian bombshell who exploded into British high society in the late 1990s, cash-rich but socially impoverished – though she disputes that analysis. “I didn’t just appear out of nowhere,” she corrects me, arching an eyebrow. “I am not this Mary Poppins of the art world that people imagine.”
After securing an impressive fortune in her 2001 divorce from her second husband, John MacBain (they built and ran Trader.com, the publishing conglomerate responsible for magazines such as AutoTrader), society watchers scoffed as madame set about evolving from an Alexis Carrington-style wife (who supposedly wore apricot-sized jewels to the office) into a sleek patron of the arts and high-profile philanthropist.
It is said that MacBain discovered art in the late 1990s when she began dating the devastatingly charming Simon de Pury, the celebrity auctioneer and art expert. She even went into business with him, taking a job as chief executive of the auction house Phillips de Pury & Company, which he co-owned. The joke is that he played Professor Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, ironing out her manners and schooling her in contemporary art. Again she denies this, saying, “I didn’t need any doors opening. They were all open anyway.” Later the company floundered and the couple split up, but the art bug had bitten. MacBain bought Art + Auction and Modern Painters, the art industry’s most revered magazines, set up the website Artinfo.com (a sort of cultural Bloomberg service), reportedly dated Prince Andrew for several months, then last year (when a large instalment from her divorce settlement arrived) launched her charity: the Louise T Blouin Foundation.
Through a series of think-tanks, research projects, award ceremonies and sponsored artistic endeavour, the foundation’s ambitious aim is to harness culture to solve problems from conflict in the Middle East to misguided education policy. It’s unclear exactly how this might work, but it could involve Palestinian and Israeli actors putting on a play together, an exhibition of new Chinese art, or seminars on how best to teach science in schools. It will also do a nice sideline in neurobiology.
Predictably, MacBain’s metamorphosis has received frosty reviews, especially in the British art world – a snooty bunch at the best of times. She talks lovingly of recently “upgrading” her collection of Gormleys, Hirsts and Koonses, but many think this enthusiasm is faux. Though some auctioneers and agents will praise her publicly (as a significant collector she is putting millions their way), the received wisdom is that she is to cultured society what bindweed is to garden walls: a pugnacious climber.
This autumn, MacBain hopes to change all that. In October, she will open a hugely expensive, self-funded arts institute in west London. It will host exhibitions, conferences and occasional bouts of contemporary dance. Yet detractors believe it has more to do with self-decoration than philanthropy. It is, they say, an elaborate ploy to secure those rare treasures money still can’t buy: deference, intellectual respect and a place at the big boys’ table at New York fundraisers and Venetian gallery openings.
Her supporters, however, insist MacBain’s endeavours arise from a personal and long-held passion for the arts. “Louise has a missionary’s zeal,” says Sir Martin Sorrell, the advertising magnate and an adviser to her foundation.
“I think she’s genuinely trying to use her influence – both economic and social – to do some good. I don’t believe she’s doing it for egotistical reasons at all.” The artist Jeff Koons tells me, “she has a great desire to contribute,” while Professor Colin Blakemore, the chief executive of the Medical Research Council, says: “Louise is enormously energetic, has a high degree of integrity and is very convincing.”
Either way, when the Louise T Blouin Institute (T for Thérèse, Blouin is her maiden name) arrives, it will be the most high-profile British-museum opening since Charles Saatchi’s on the South Bank. As the space, or rather, multipurpose spaces, will host a range of art forms – including film and music – it could become a serious rival to the struggling ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts). At 35,000 sq ft, the MacBain institute is already six times bigger. Members of the advisory board include Sir Christopher Frayling, Jeremy Irons and Bianca Jagger. But will fervent interest in its figurehead eclipse all that? Already rumours abound that MacBain (who, despite being resident in Britain, recently moved most of her business concerns to New York and put her £28m Holland Park mansion on the market) has lost heart and is skulking back across the Atlantic nursing a bruised ego. You must be worried, I say. Your institute isn’t even open, and already London society has defeated you. “No, no! Don’t listen to these people,” she cries. “I love London. I’m staying in London.” Her voice sounds uncannily like Céline Dion’s. “We all feel fear sometimes, but is this the most scary thing I’ve done? Non. This is London. This is easy.”
Two weeks earlier, in a former factory in Shepherd’s Bush (“It’s Holland Park, actually,” snaps the architect), MacBain is picking her way through piles of industrial debris in a pair of pencil-thin high heels. They aren’t the shoes one normally wears on a building site, even if you’re bankrolling it, but MacBain says she likes them – “they make me taller, bigger, more confident.”
How curious – her facade is as confident as her ambition seems naked. I had been warned that MacBain even had a superiority complex, but there is something under-confident about her, frail even, especially in the rare moments when she relaxes. When anxious, which is often, her default settings are pretension and boastfulness, reeling off statements like, “I’m off to Russia next week, where I’ll see President Putin,” or, “I built a large multinational company. I establish things. I meet wonderful children in need of help.”
Today, MacBain sports expensive highlights, a perfect manicure, 7 jeans, sun-kissed skin and bee-stung lips – in short, the kind of east-coast American glamour that makes every British woman look like an unmade bed. She drove herself here in a black Mini from her nearby mansion, where I had begged to interview her and to which she refused me entry. It is, by all accounts, vast, full of museum-quality art and manned by uniformed, French-speaking staff.
The institute is similarly elaborate: spanning three storeys, the ceiling of its entrance hall stands 35ft high. Overlooking the celebrity photographer Mario Testino’s studio and the offices of groovy Chrysalis, MacBain believes this could be the new Hoxton, as far as culture goes. “On time and on budget,” she says, which means her patch of the old factory will have set her back about £20m.
The previous day we had met at a hotel, where she laid out the game plan for me. Having chaired a successful seminar with Bill Clinton – another friend – earlier this year, once she’s done opening the institute she will host the Global Creative Leadership summit in New York, where Calvin Klein and Henry Kissinger, among others, will talk art, politics, science and commerce. This will be an annual event.
“We’re in a world where we have to understand culture, now more than ever,” she says, citing the fallout from the Norwegian cartoons of Muhammad last year. She then bemoans how being exposed to the world through the internet and instant news has made us more nationalistic. “The French want to keep their truffles, but they also have to be part of the world. Part of the problem is that there’s no president of the world,” she sighs. Would you like that job? Her laughter tinkles, but she doesn’t rule it out.
But why bother, I ask? Why not just use the money you’ve made and have a little fun?
“It all started with my mother, really, who took me to every single museum in Montreal when I was young,” she says uncertainly. MacBain never discusses her private life. “She was also very involved in volunteer work, so I learnt about that too. These days we forget that North America has some good things, and one of them is that we are brought up with a sense to thank for what we have and to share it. It’s like the Medici times: local families contributing to local causes. We were taught to give more than to receive. That was the priority.” But your parents were hardly the Medicis. Weren’t they insurance brokers? “My parents owned a life-insurance company,” she cries. “They were not brokers like it’s been reported. They owned it. It’s so important to know that,” she says, then blushes a little at her forcefulness.
In previous profiles her mother has been cast as a latter-day Mrs Bennet, a middle-class matron keen to marry off her five daughters as far up the ladder as possible. If so, she outdid herself with her elder daughter, Hélène, who wed a Desmarais, the Canadian equivalent of a Rockefeller or a Carnegie. But for Louise, the youngest, marriage proved trickier. Her first, to the tobacco heir David Stewart was annulled. “I was 21 and it only lasted a few months. He was a wonderful man, but it had to be cancelled.” On what grounds? “Oh no, I can’t say… too personal. It was very difficult to get an annulment from the Catholic church. We had to ask the Pope.”
For tragic reasons, she was more interested in work, anyway. For almost her entire childhood, until he succumbed to cancer when she was 15, her father was dying. “It’s not unusual to want to look after yourself when you’ve had a father who is ill. So when I was 16 I said to my mother that I didn’t want her to worry about me, that I wanted her to benefit from any financial resources she was left with. So I started work, doing the accounts for a little lamp store, then for my brother, who had a computer firm.”
When she was 10, MacBain was diagnosed as dyslexic, but she had a magic way with numbers. To this day, she says, she finds a good balance sheet “comforting”. She left convent school at 19, got a job as a financial analyst for an investment bank, then met John, whom she married at 27 and has three teenage children with. The pair bought Trader together in 1987 for $3.9m and built it to a peak value of around $2.7 billion, employing about 5,000 people on 400 magazines in 25 countries.
MacBain says: “We had great success, but the more I think about my life now, the more I think I’m getting closer to the person I was at 16” – meaning when she was at her most tenacious. Along with Bill Gates, she says she was one of the first to foresee the power of the internet in the early 1990s. “There will always be people who doubt me, but you have to believe in yourself, to try to find your confidence. When the nuns at my school told me I was stupid because I couldn’t write well, I fought harder.” She also sailed competitively, which she adored. “Speed, strategy, getting in touch with my body,” she says, stretching voluptuously. “I found my confidence in being better than the other guy. I found my confidence in winning.”
But despite becoming outrageously wealthy, she says confidence became an issue in her adult life because she was ashamed of her dyslexia. When she was 39, living in Geneva, she made a breakthrough. She found a book that praised the dyslexic brain for its cross-disciplinary thinking, and listed Albert Einstein and Sir Richard Branson as fellow sufferers. “What a great list to be on, right?” she smiles.
She’d been collecting for 15 years (“furniture, then pictures, then photography”), so after decades spent elbow-deep in the grim day-to-day running of a multinational, she decided to combine her hobby with her work. “I love beauty and I love talent, so that’s what I did. Now I enhance people’s creativity.” And your own social standing, too? “No, I’m not a socialite. I only go to parties to help people.” I snigger . “Seriously. It’s like work.” And you’re a workaholic? “Yes.”
Back in the cafe, we dust ourselves down after the whole “poor people” disaster, and MacBain, to her credit, says that “when you’re in poverty it can be pretty hard to appreciate anything.” I ask why she thinks so many people don’t like her. “In my life there are always jealous people, and the people who are the worst for it are the ones who don’t build anything themselves.” Does it get you down? “No. My mother said, ‘There will always be people who have more than you, too. Look up to them.’” Is London worse for this sort of thing? “Well, the press is harsher.” Such as ending up on the front of the tabloids with Prince Andrew? “Yes. But then, I am the press too,” she adds, referring to the art magazines she owns. “So on some level I understand. I’ve had this kind of focus for years, and it doesn’t bother me. Sometimes I don’t even read it,” she adds grandly, which I don’t believe.
Despite selling her house, she is staying in London but downsizing – buying a penthouse in Lord Foster’s Albion Riverside building in Battersea and keeping the sales division of her magazines and the charity offices here, too. Last year she bought adjacent apartments in the new Richard Meier building in New York, but says she can’t spend too much time there for tax reasons. I tell her my favourite MacBain story is the one about her buying the top floor for $20m, realising there was no space for her washing machine, then buying the one below for $15m. She squeals with laughter. “Who told you that?! People will just say anything. In fact, I bought it for my children, but they’ll both be fantastic for my collection,” she smiles. “It’s all about art with me. Art, art, art!” she trills.
Since she has finally relaxed, I risk a question about her love life. I hear you’re dating the American broadcaster Charlie Rose? “No, I’m not,” she replies, stern again. “Charlie is a great friend, like any other.” So you’re single?
“I’m not telling you.” Instead, she describes a lonely life of 17-hour work days, rising at five to read the papers before an hour and a half of pilates, and jogging at seven. MacBain is obsessed with her health. With her father’s early death and her mother’s more recent diagnosis with Alzheimer’s, who can blame her? Soon to turn 50, she says she worries she won’t get everything done in time. Rather than the story of a social climber, perhaps MacBain’s tale has a different theme: fear of death?
“The real problem,” says Sorrell, “is that she’s too blonde, too Canadian and too female to have done so well. People don’t like it.” “She can probably seem overambitious,” agrees Blakemore. “She wanted to solve all the problems of the world with $60m. But it would be a great pity if London shrugged its shoulders just because she’s ambitious.”
Palestine, China, poverty, education reform – foundations with far more money fight and fail in these arenas. And how much will conferences and cultural exchange help, never mind a gallery in a leafy London borough? But MacBain’s is a worthwhile effort. “I want everyone to come and visit the institute to judge for themselves,” she says – and no doubt they will. She can be socially awkward, highly strung and overly grand, but it could have been so much worse. She could have spent it all on diamonds.