Peruse the catalogues for the Bruce’s “Pleasures of Collecting” exhibition series, and you will come across plenty of blue-chip artworks attributed to that greatest collector of all time: Anonymous. Examples include James Rosenquist’s mixed-media Trophys of an Old Soldier, 1962; Eva Hesse’s 1964 painting Boxes; a massive 1997 spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois; a 1936 landscape by Alexei von Jawlensky; a circa 1916 female portrait by Modigliani; an 1878 self-portrait by Manet; works on paper by Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha and Cy Twombly; sculptures by Ron Mueck and Gavin Turk; paintings by Braque, Close, Dine, Ernst, Freud, Klee, Léger, Lichtenstein, Monet, Pissarro and Seurat.

As the Bruce Museum director Peter Sutton points out, many residents of Greenwich prefer to remain private, even among themselves. One local collector of modern art remarks, “If someone was doing something new in town, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”

"Anonymous" originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July 2008 Table of Contents.