The chairman of Sotheby’s UK chooses his favourite art collectors of our time
Kenneth Clark, Baron Clark by Yousuf Karsh, 1965 (with thanks to the National Portrait Gallery) Copyright: estate of Yousuf Karsh/National Portrait Gallery, London
1. Kenneth Clark (1903-1983)
Kenneth Clark was the grandest of grandees in the art world. During the war and after, his presence was everywhere on committees serving the arts. As with his hero John Ruskin there was always a social and moral dimension to his belief in the importance of bringing art to the widest audience. His landmark series Civilization was his greatest triumph – the last great synthesis of art, music, literature and thought – and the most influential art book and series of its time.
Shortly after he died in 1983, Sotheby’s held a sale of a part of his collection, and with Japanese, Chinese and African elements it was suitably eclectic. It was strong on medieval works of art and illuminated pages as well as Renaissance medals and maiolica. What separates it from all the other Art Historian collections was his passionate concern about the artists of his generation, and the sale contained works by the many artists who became his close friends: Victor Pasmore, Graham Sutherland, Mary Potter, Sydney Nolan, John Piper and above all Henry Moore. He bought from Moore’s first exhibition in 1928 and was an early supporter of all these artists and set up a special trust fund to support them. When he became director of the National Gallery in 1934 at the age of thirty-one, it was considered odd that the director should champion living artists, but in the end one must admit that Clark’s collection represented a largely neo-romantic view of British Contemporary art.
2. Douglas Cooper (1911-84)
The only English rival to Roland Penrose for the affections of Picasso was Douglas Cooper. It was fine as long as Penrose was living in France but post-war he was back in England and Cooper was in the South of France close to the artist, who took great pleasure in playing the two of them off against each other. Cooper, who had a well developed gift for making enemies, was scathing about Penrose and his collection, calling it “ready-made”.
A brilliant art historian and linguist, he became the world authority on cubism and his collection was correspondingly important. It was amassed largely in six years between 1933-39 from a shadowy German collector living in Switzerland named G. F. Reber, who had lost his money in the 1929 crash. Cooper concentrated on four artists: Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris, but he also had works by Klee and Miro. The collection was housed in Egerton Terrace in London until 1949, when Cooper and his companion, John Richardson, stumbled across the Château de Castille in the Gard district of the south of France, a sleeping beauty which they transformed into what L’Oeil dubbed le Château des Cubistes.
Cooper’s cubist collection was mostly of pre-war composition but it attained classic status and set the standard for all subsequent Picasso collections. Outrageous, extrovert, touchy and utterly confident in his views, Douglas Cooper wouldn’t suffer fools and developed a strong Anglophobia based on intense disdain for the Tate Gallery and the philistinism of a fox- hunting elite.
3. Robert (1906-2000) and Lisa Sainsbury
In the mid 1970s Denys Sutton, editor of Apollo magazine, lamented the decline of English collecting but pointed to the one big shining exception, Bob and Lisa Sainsbury. Their collection represents a rather continental fusion of ancient civilisations and modern masters that Jacob Epstein had pioneered in England. The Sainsburys brought this taste up to date with Henry Moore and Francis Bacon with a glance back to Picasso and Giacometti.
Of all the achievements of Bob and Lisa as collectors, surely the most remarkable is their early and unstinting support for Francis Bacon. They acquired at least a dozen of his works before anybody else and he became a close friend. Bob guaranteed his overdraft and it is said that the only time that the artist ever behaved well was when he was with the Sainsburys.
Their taste rapidly developed towards what was called, in those days, the primitive. Through John Hewett they were able to buy three New Guinea pieces from Pierre Loeb’s collection. The Pacific section was never as large as the African section but contains important pieces such as the Cook Island male figure or “Fisherman’s God”. The African works include the Yoruba shrine figure from Nigeria and a Benin bronze head as well as striking lesser pieces such as the “Derain” Gabon Fang Mask.
Today the collection can be seen at the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
4. Alistair McAlpine
One of the oddest, most voracious and perplexing of collectors is Alistair McAlpine, whom Mrs Thatcher ennobled in 1983 as Lord McAlpine of West Green. Born into a Scots building dynasty settled in the Thames Valley, McAlpine has abundant curiosity and restless energy, qualities that he believes to be essential in collectors. Possession is the least important part of collecting for him: “I collect I suppose to learn, for I have never collected to possess. When a collection passes from my hands it goes in total – nothing remains”. I gave up counting the number of collections that Alistair McAlpine has formed but it is well in excess of forty, on each of which for a time he concentrated to the point of compulsion. He has shed them even faster. Today he lives with relatively little, apart from vast accumulations of books and textiles, and instead writes about collecting.
McAlpine’s collecting ranged across everything from Hockney prints, photography, arts and crafts, Islamic, guns, armour, American rag dolls, porcelain, police truncheons, shells, minerals, Soviet manifestos, 19th-century French literary manuscripts, first editions, beads, old fashioned roses (420 varieties), farm implements, rare chickens (75 different breeds), to snowdrops. He would often form several collections at the same time and when his interest shifted he would either give them away or - as he was increasingly inclined - sell the collection en bloc.
5. Charles Saatchi
Saatchi has always said that “I primarily buy art to show it off” and the acquisition in 1983 of gallery space at Boundary Road was the greatest stimulation. London had seen nothing like it before: huge, neutral and dedicated entirely to contemporary art, it became the focus of the London avant garde.
He opened with American art in 1985 with Donald Judd, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. This was followed up the next year with Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella and Dan Flavin. The third year showed no let-up with Kiefer and Serra, followed by an exhibition of New York Art Now including Koons and Gober. The American artists he chose were, for the most part, already well known in New York but there is a pleasing circularity because the young British artists who saw these exhibitions, including Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville and Rachel Whiteread, were to feed the next generation of Saatchi exhibitions and elevate the collection to world status. Collectors are usually rewarded with the credit they receive for their choice of art works but Charles Saatchi is one of a tiny handful of collectors who can also be said to have influenced a generation of artists.
Extracted from Great Collectors of Our Time, published by Scala, November 1, 2007
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