For some people collecting art is not work, unlike trading in it. Yet, tracing the events that the books on art collecting gathered in the list below recount, it is impossible not to realize how blurry is the boundary between these two ways of enjoying the experience of owning work. To read them is to ensure yourself a considerable amount of insights, which is likely to prove very useful, whether you are on this side or already on the other side of the fence. Yep. because like commerce, collecting is an activity rooted in the most primal essence of being human, and therefore tends to keep itself the same over time and space. And it is an activity that sometimes results in a real profession, that of the merchant indeed.
Burton B. Fredericksen, The Burden of Wealth: Paul Getty and his museum, 2015.
This is the most disillusioned, detailed, and well-informed account of the extraordinary collecting affair of Jean Paul Getty and all that has happened, for better or worse, to the great American institution since the death of its founder (who had published The Joys of Collecting in 1965). Fredericksen has been a direct contributor to Getty since its beginnings in the early 1950s, and he published this sort of eyewitness account just after he retired, dealing in great detail with the major acquisitions, the less fortunate purchases, and the power struggles unleashed after the founder’s departure. The text is essential for anyone who wants to have a clear idea of how much the United States and its capitals influenced the geography and volume of the European ancient art market. Prominent in this picture, moreover, is the figure of Federico Zeri, a key player on the international scene in the development of the most extensive, though probably not the best, private art collection in the world.
Catherine Hickley, The Munich Art Hoard, 2016. The Hildebrand Gurlitt affair is emblematic with regard to the dynamics that wartime conflicts can bring to the field of art heritage. Beyond the news item, and the media excesses surroundings the 2012 discovery by German authorities of the corpus of works left behind by Hildebrand’ son Cornelius, the book well restores the role that artworks continue to play even when the values of the economy are radicalized by wartime demands. The concept of the safe-haven asset could not find a better explanation, not least because the narrative crosses a historical period from which our society directly stems from.
Christopher Mason, The Art of the Steal, 2005. Impossible to think of having more details about the court case involving A. Alfred Taubman, Sotheby’s largest shareholder since 1983. Again, the point is not the “price fixing” conviction in which the U.S. businessman stumbled for agreeing with competitor Christie’s so as to make commissions on sellers non-negotiable. Rather, through the very accurate testimony of the protagonist, Christopher Davidge, former chief executive of Christie’s, the book offers a social and economic glimpse into the world to which the big international auction houses were addressing at the turn of the 20th century. If then, after reading the book, one looks at the auction of Taubman’s collection, which was auctioned in three stages in 2015 (link), it also gives one an idea of how much one can actually gather by collecting art with money, expertise, passion, and the best information.
Richard L.Feigen, Tales From the Art Crypt, 2000. Passing away in 2021 at age 90, Feigen was the first dealer able to deal in antiquities and contemporary art with equal expertise. He is credited with the first exhibition of Francis Bacon in the United States, but the Chicago dealer also worked with Jean Dubuffet, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Cornell, James Rosenquist, and Ray Johnson, when these were emerging artists, or nearly so. The book is a professional biography that helps to understand the context in which twentieth-century market giants were born, and what their sources of supply were.
Suzanne Muchnic, The Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture, 1998. The only available biography of the great American collector is perhaps a bit benevolent, but it certainly has the merit of doing justice to the professionalism with which Simon understood his role as a collector. From a certain point onward for Simon collecting was a job in effect, where he brought his entrepreneurial skills to put them at the service of a purpose that today comes across as philanthropic rather than self-aggrandizing. There are few entrepreneurs who, having just started out, knew how to (and were able to) detach themselves from their companies to devote themselves to collecting. Simon is a role model that today finds equal only in the luxury industry, which, however, of culture has a clearly more instrumental vision.
Erling Kagge, Poor Collector’s Guide to Buying Great Art, 2015. There are collectors who follow others and collectors who lead the flock. Erling Kagge belongs to the second category. An editor, lawyer, but above all an explorer, to whom the Time dedicated its cover, calling him the hero who first reached the Three Poles (the southern one solo). He drives a Rolls Royce (decorated by Franz West), and in his book, which mimics Eugene M. Schwartz’s legendary Confessions of a Poor Collector (1979), Kagge shows that he has gone far beyond the limits of geographical exploration. An avid and devoted collector, among the most prominent on the current scene, he is a pioneer who dispenses valuable advice aimed at those wishing to learn how to juggle the art world. Although Kagge deals only with contemporary art, his suggestions can be universally applied: “trust your instincts, demand quality. Only then, one day, will the market chase you” (Ernst Beyeler also said this), or ‘the true collector is the one who builds a collection without looking at profit’; and ”those with unlimited budgets usually have boring collections.” Kagge’s is a limpid, off-the-cuff voice, between the philosophical and the concrete, full of stories that are always instrumental.
Christophe Mory, Ernst Beyeler, A Passion for Art, 2011. If Basel today is such a major international attraction for dealers, collectors, insiders and art lovers, credit is also due to Ernst Beyeler (1921-2010). The two hundred works in his collection are the flagship of the foundation he wanted and entrusted to Renzo Piano, which opened in Riehen in 1997. In a series of conversations with Christophe Mory, Beyeler, a present-day personification of the character of Sylvestre Bonnard so brilliantly delineated by Anatole France in 1881, recounts the evolution from an antiquarian expert in books to an art dealer, into whose hands masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and Francis Bacon have passed. Quoting Léger, Beyeler observes how “prettiness is the enemy of true beauty,” thus inviting us to evaluate a work of art by how it challenges the viewer. He then reveals some tricks of the trade, confessing that he “always found a second potential buyer to place a painting, so as to psychologically influence the first interested party” and “never to juxtapose masterpieces and works by lesser artists, because genius is thus debased.” These are pearls of wisdom, instilled along the tale of personal recollections, which are able to imprint themselves in the memory of the reader invited to consolidate his or her own point of view.
Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Enrichment, a critique of the commodity, 2021. We are surrounded by commodities. If yesterday, following Benjamin’s thought, luxury boasted of its “blind faith in progress” and its “industrial” origin, the 21st century flaneur is immersed in a completely different reality. Capitalist accumulation continues, but it is based on new economic devices associated with the valorization of goods-fetish. The key word of the study conducted by sociologists Boltanski and Esquerre is “enrichment,” analyzed in its dual valence of value added to something pre-existing obtained through the narrative that fuels its legend and desirability; and, secondly, to be understood as exploitation of the trade in goods that are primarily intended for the wealthy classes and constitute for them, an additional source of empowerment. The scholars knowledgeably investigate the value, trade and collecting of works of art through historical, sociological and literary comparisons, and provide a detailed psychological analysis of the figures of the merchant, the collector and the valuables. A well-documented and complex text that sheds light on the often opaque but universally shared dynamics of the luxury market.Bruce Chatwin, Utz, 2000. A passion for objects can become a reason for living: is it a love that destroys or saves? Utz smiles and dances, alone, amid the collection of Meissen porcelain, crammed on the shelves in rows of six. They are his joy, his obsession. Against the backdrop of a claustrophobic gray Prague, that of the Iron Curtain, ruled by a vexatious regime that threatens the fragile love of our fallen baron, Bruce Chatwin constructs a detective story between fact and fiction, closely examining “the disease of collecting.” Utz, rejecting the squalor of the world, pampers Harlequins and Columbines, sublimating them into an aestheticizing experience. The cult of beauty thus becomes an act of resistance against the horrors of the present, the talisman for not surrendering to oppression. But “the secret Lilliputian world” is also its chain, for the baron cannot escape by leaving it behind. This little book of just over 100 pages, the last one written by Chatwin known for his travel journals, grew out of an autobiographical experience, an encounter with a serial hoarder who died without leaving a trace of his collection (the writer also worked for the auction house Sotheby’s and must have known many hoarders). In 2011, thanks in part to some of the insights in the book, the real Utz’s collection was found in a vault in Switzerland, returned to his heirs (who were completely unaware of Chatwin’s novel) and then auctioned off for a million-dollar sum. Thus comes full circle: from reality to fiction, and back again.
