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.”

Since the mid-1970s, Prince has collected literature and related memorabilia, including one of two inscribed copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses known to be in private hands, as well as the pulp novels and advertising illustrations that have made their way into his own art—results of a kind of hunting and gathering that he describes as “beachcombing.” But the artist has also built up notable holdings of postwar paintings. “I have one of the ‘retrospective’ Warhols, which I just lent to a show at Gagosian this summer, and I have a ‘Car Crash,’ ” he says. “I have a really nice flower painting, too.”

Prince acquires some of his pieces by trading with other artists, including Damien Hirst. Hirst and Prince also exchange their works with Gagosian, who represents them both, for other high-value property in the dealer’s substantial inventory of secondary-market material. For all concerned, the transactional relationship is a match made in art-buying heaven, enabling them to take advantage of section 1031 of the tax code. Under this “like-kind exchanges” provision, the owner of a Warhol, say, can trade it to another “investor” for a similarly valued Koons while deferring the recognition of any capital gains or losses generated until the Koons is cashed in. At that point, his or her cost basis is calculated by adding the gain to or subtracting the loss from the original purchase price of the Warhol. In the process, both parties in the swap avoid the 28 percent tax that is levied on gains from outright sales, at auction or otherwise, of appreciated artworks.

Prince also purchases artworks from other New York dealers. “Jeannie Greenberg found me a great David Hammons,” he says. “I recently bought a Carroll Dunham and a Christopher Wool from Skarstedt Gallery.” Observes Per Skarstedt, who sells to Hirst too: “Artists don’t buy as an investment the same way as a lot of other people do. They are in it for the long term. These artists make a ton of money, but they have no idea about other types of investments. Art is what they know.”

And they can be quite devoted to certain artists. Hirst, for instance, has a particular passion for Francis Bacon. “I’ve got five paintings by Bacon,” he says. “I always loved him. When I was an art student he was hanging around, and I saw him a few times. I just think he’s one of the world’s greatest painters.” At Sotheby’s New York in November 2007, Hirst, bidding through his business agent, Frank Dunphy, beat out three others for a small Bacon Self Portrait from 1969, paying a massive $33 million—at the time, the fourth highest price for a Bacon at auction. Hirst also possesses the rarely exhibited Untitled (Half-Length Figure in Sea), circa 1953–54, which he acquired from the artist’s estate.

“In the Darkest Hour There May Be Light,” an exhibition of Hirst’s collection staged at the Serpentine Gallery, in London, in 2006, included works by Banksy, John Currin and Warhol, among others, demonstrating the breadth of the artist’s taste. The London private dealer Ivor Braka, known to aid Hirst in secondary-market transactions, describes the Serpentine roster as just “the tip of the iceberg” of the artist’s holdings. Hirst also owns pieces by his Young British Artists peers, as well as many by Ashley Bickerton, says the London dealer Gerard Faggionato. Last February at Sotheby’s London, Hirst bought Koons’s stainless-steel sculpture Kiepenkerl, 1987, for £3.2 million ($6.3 million).

One notable aspect of Hirst’s collecting, Braka says, is that it clearly echoes “his own artistic interests and his own psychology.” Indeed, however genuine Hirst’s connection to Bacon’s art is (he has reportedly painted figurative works, without assistants, in the style of Bacon), it’s not surprising that this one-man publicity machine, who briefly held the title of most expensive living artist at auction, would have a stake in the market for the work of the most expensive postwar artist. Sources close to Hirst say he wanted to make enough from his Beautiful Inside My Head Forever sale in London this past September to be able to afford a Bacon triptych.

Some artists are quieter about their art-buying activities, as if the term collector were unsavory. “Very few painters want to be perceived as collectors,” says the art historian and Picasso biographer John Richardson, noting that for those who make art, acquiring “is a whole different process. I think, in each case, the artist has a different take on collecting.” Richardson cites Lucian Freud as one who keeps his purchases close to the vest. “Lucian would hate to be described as a collector,” he states. “These things are sort of accumulated.” Thanks to his more-forthcoming friends and acquaintances, it is known that Freud possesses not only one of the finest groups of pictures by fellow School of London painter Frank Auerbach, whose work has shot up in market value over the past few seasons, but also an early Cézanne interior, which inspired his own After Cézanne, 1999–2000, and an early Corot oil study of a woman, based in part on the Mona Lisa. According to Richardson, the British painter also has “perhaps one of the greatest Bacons of all”: the rarely exhibited Two Figures, 1953, which he acquired from the dealer Erica Brausen, of London’s Hanover Gallery, in the 1950s. The elusive Freud would comment only through his London lawyer, Diana Rawstron, of the firm Goodman Derrick, in London, who says: “I regret that your information is inaccurate. And, apart from that, Mr. Freud has nothing further to say on the subject.”

For his part, Jeff Koons has pursued older and historically significant works by a surprising range of artists. At Sotheby’s London in June 2007, he paid £1.6 million ($3.1 million) for Gustave Courbet’s Femme Nue, 1865–66, the last great Courbet nude from this period still in private hands. Part of its appeal is that it depicts Joanna Hiffernan, a famous redheaded Irish beauty who was involved with the artist James McNeill Whistler when she met Courbet, who immediately stole her affections.

At Sotheby’s New York this past January, Koons acquired a rare lime-wood carving of Saint Catherine by the German Renaissance master Tilman Riemenschneider for a record $6.31 million (est. $4–6 million). The sculpture is a sort of touchstone for Koons, who worked with German craftsmen on a number of his most celebrated works from the late 1980s, including Buster Keaton, Winter Bears and Ushering in Banality. “For Koons to buy a Renaissance work is absolutely brilliant—and a brilliant career move,” observes Maurice Tuchman, a New York–based art adviser and a longtime supporter of the artist. “It makes you see his work in that context, and it gives it additional historical significance.”

A picture from an artist’s holdings may have a particular allure for prospective buyers. If they can’t get their hands on a work by a particular talent, something he or she owned and appreciated may be the next best thing. Moreover, experience—and some museum collections— indicate that artists can make prescient choices. The Musée Picasso, in Paris, was founded with the works from Picasso’s near-encyclopedic collection, which his heirs donated to the state in 1973 in lieu of estate taxes. Sometimes, though, artist-connoisseurs can be too far ahead of the curve. The Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte, for instance, amassed a stunning collection of about 60 of his contemporaries’ works, including dazzling examples by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet and Renoir, which he bequeathed to the state when he died, in 1894. Initially, officials were unenthusiastic about the gift, and after years of negotiation, the national museums kept only about 40 works. Many of the remaining paintings were later purchased by the American collector Albert Barnes and now belong to the Barnes Foundation, in Pennsylvania. In 1988, barely a year after Warhol’s death, an auction of the artist’s holdings at Sotheby’s New York realized $25.2 million, with the proceeds benefiting the newly created Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. If that sale were held now, when demand for Warhol’s art is greater than ever and prices for it run up to $71 million, the final tally would be many times higher.

For artists with already bankable reputations, owning art adds to their status and, potentially, to their fortunes. But it also means they are even more deeply enmeshed in the health of that particular market. No diversification of asset classes here. “I think the irony of it is that these painters who’ve made billions out of their work, rather like the hedge-fund people who’ve made billions out of their work, buy paintings because what the hell else are they going to spend their money on?” says Richardson.

Ultimately, perhaps, artists are just as prone as others to the existential imperative of materialism: I acquire, therefore I am. In an interview with the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist printed in the Serpentine Gallery catalogue of his collection show, Hirst tellingly notes: “As a human being, as you go through life, you just do collect. It was that sort of entropic collecting that I found myself interested in—just amassing stuff while you’re alive. It’s just the stuff washed up on a beach somewhere, and that somewhere is you. Then, when you die, it all gets washed away again.” "Artists' Most Wanted" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2008 Table of Contents.