Inside Man

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"Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945" by James Stourton (Scala, $75)

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Granted, many collectors put out their own catalogues or are represented in those published by museums. And a few, like Peggy Guggenheim, David Rockefeller, Heinz Berggruen and Giuseppe Panza, have published memoirs. But it’s rare to find a book devoted solely to art collectors. That’s what makes this volume, Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945 (Scala, $75), a sequel of sorts to Douglas Cooper’s 1963 Great Private Collections, valuable for anyone curious about acquiring art.

It’s also an enjoyable read, as James Stourton spins tales about more than 120 private collections—based in the United States and Europe, specializing in fields from antiquities to contemporary art—many of which he has visited personally. As the chairman of Sotheby’s U.K., Stourton has had extraordinary access to extraordinary collections, and he has put this perquisite to good use.

Along with the most famous arts patrons in recent memory—Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Berggruen among them—he also covers more discreet collectors, such as French-decorative-arts specialists Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, of New York, and downright reclusive ones, like Esther Grether, of Basel, who credits her then-seven-year-old son with lighting her passion for Francis Bacon, four of whose triptychs she now owns, by leading her to the artist’s work one year at Art Basel. Then there are the vague descriptions of Peter Kranz, who grew up somewhere in Europe, lives somewhere in America and collects decorative arts, and Dr. Konrad Preissler, who lives in Zurich and owns the Meissen porcelain Swan service, which the author calls the “most important table service of all time.” If you’ve never heard of Kranz or Preissler, you are not alone. In his acknowledgments, Stourton admits that he made up their names to preserve their anonymity.

That aside, Stourton brings most of his profiles to life with choice personal anecdotes. I never realized that Norton Simon began buying Indian art at the urging of his second wife, actress Jennifer Jones. Nor did I know that London contemporary-art guru Charles Saatchi started his buying spree as a teenager with Superman comics and jukeboxes. And I was intrigued by the fact that Hong Kong porcelain collector E.T. Chow, active in the mid-20th century, named his seven children alphabetically and had them dust his ceramic treasures in an elaborate bedtime ritual each night.

Stourton writes a fascinating entry on Chow that doubles as a story about the growing market for Chinese porcelain. This exemplifies one of the book’s greatest strengths: By grouping some collectors by geography—from Chicago’s great midcentury connoisseurs of Surrealism, led by lawyer Joseph Shapiro, to the Hong Kong aficionados who followed Chow—Stourton demonstrates that private collecting is rarely an isolated activity. It can be intensely social and even contagious, sweeping through certain circles in a particular place at a particular time.

Unfortunately, even Stourton’s best profiles exhibit the kind of flattery you expect of an auctioneer trying to court a consignor. He calls Eli Broad’s Los Angeles home an “astonishing house where the wonders of nature are almost as enthralling.” He singles out London’s Danny Katz as “the most singular [dealer] and one of the most gifted of his generation,” with “an acute and penetrating sensitivity to works of art.” And he crows that St. Louis newsman Joseph Pulitzer “must have been loved by the gods: He was intelligent and charming, with the looks of Apollo.”

This puffery is not simply a verbal tic but a sign of Stourton’s chummily biased and cheerily imbalanced approach. Although the book’s format is encyclopedic, its information often seems skewed or incomplete; footnotes, for example, are lacking. Stourton is strangely sympathetic to Charles Saatchi, glossing over his “Sensation”-era controversies with a line or two. He is thin on photography, leaving out pioneering collectors like Andre Jammes and Sam Wagstaff. And American connoisseurs get little play compared with their European counterparts. Where are Ronald Lauder, Leon Black and Steve Wynn, for starters? Anticipating such questions, Stourton unconvincingly writes in his preface that since “they are constantly being sought for interviews and inspection of their collections . . . their story can wait.”