Artists' Most Wanted

Christopher Wool Damien Hirst Robert Rauschenberg Albrecht Durer Takashi Murakami Jeff Koons Banksy Gustave Caillebotte

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Last May the appearance of Takashi Murakami at the postwar and contemporary evening sale at Sotheby’s New York caused a paparazzi frenzy. The superstar artist watched his 1998 sculpture My Lonesome Cowboy bring a record-shattering $15.1 million. But that wasn’t the sole reason he was there. Although most in attendance did not notice, Murakami vied against fierce competition for the last lot of the night, Yoshitomo Nara’s sculpture of a little girl Light My Fire, 2001, eventually prevailing with a bid of nearly $1.2 million.

Murakami, who also owns works by Maurizio Cattelan, Mark Grotjahn and Ugo Rondinone, among many others, says he had “fallen in love” with the Nara. When he saw it in the Sotheby’s catalogue, he says, “I got so excited that I lost my good sense.” The enthusiastic Murakami may be the most public artist-collector, but he is not the only one. As prices for their own works skyrocket, artists are spending steep sums for high-end postwar pieces and important Old Master paintings.

Artist-collectors, of course, go back at least to Rembrandt, who owned works by Titian, Leonardo, Raphael, Dürer and Rubens and even bought back some of his own pictures in the auction houses of 17th-century Amsterdam. Picasso was famously acquisitive, amassing the art of such contemporaries as Braque, Miró and Modigliani and by such masters as Chardin and Courbet, as well as Oceanic and African objects. Andy Warhol collected everything from kitschy cookie jars to the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. And, in a kind of mutual admiration society, artists have always exchanged works, as van Gogh famously did with Gauguin, and Picasso with Matisse. Some have found inspiration in their acquisitions, however obtained: Jasper Johns has cited his Bather with Outstretched Arms, an oil study by Cézanne from 1883–85 (which once belonged to Edgar Degas), as a significant influence on Diver, 1962, one of Johns’s most celebrated paintings.

Artists today still buy and swap works because they admire and appreciate them, but they also seem to have another agenda. Having watched the social and professional status of art buyers rise along with auction prices, art creators, too, are seeking the benefits bestowed by the collector designation. No longer content to be producers, they want to be connoisseurs, as well. And they are not collecting merely as a form of investment. “What makes such a big difference with Hirst and Koons is that they are getting very rich,” says the New York private dealer Philippe Ségalot. That wealth enables them to “compete at the highest levels,” says Brett Gorvy, the cohead of the postwar and contemporary art department at Christie’s. “Now they buy the best of the best, because they have the financial muscle to do it.”

Participating on both sides of art-market transactions carries other advantages. In the United States, for example, artists donating their own works to cultural institutions may take a deduction for only the value of the materials used, but on gifts of artworks by others they are entitled to all the social and financial perks, including deductions of full market value, accorded other donors.

For the recipient museums, an artist provenance, even if it is attached to a short-term loan for a temporary exhibition, “adds another layer of meaning to the work,” says Benedict Leca, the curator of European paintings and sculpture at the Cincinnati Art Museum, who worked on the 2006 “Cézanne in Provence” exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., to which Jasper Johns loaned his Bather with Outstretched Arms. “One wants to probe into what it was that made that piece significant for that artist. It is like seeing it through the prism of what we know of Johns and his work.”

Given the box-office potential of celebrity sources, it’s not surprising that artist-collectors—at least those with a reputation for generosity—are frequently asked to share their holdings. “I just loaned a David Hammons piece to a gallery in Manhattan and a Keith Haring subway drawing to the Tony Shafrazi Gallery [in New York],” says Richard Prince, who explains that he tries to accommodate most requests but that the insurance forms and “the wear and tear” on his favorite pieces “can be a drag.”