The High Life

Yasumasa Morimura Damien Hirst Paul McCarthy Andy Warhol Jake and Dinos Chapman Roy Lichtenstein Glenn Ligon Frank Stella

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In a corner of Bob and Nancy Magoon’s expansive living room in Aspen, Colorado, is a "portrait" of the couple. Composed entirely of phrases and dates stenciled on the wall in gray paint, the piece was conceived by the late Cuban-born artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres after he spent several days with the Magoons in 1993. "He so believed that portraits don’t have to be about your face," says Nancy, a chic 60-something (she won’t reveal her exact age).

The Gonzalez-Torres work refers to the Magoons’s since-deceased black Labs, Jasper Johns and Louise Nevelson — now Damien Hirst and Frida Kahlo, also black Labs, rule the roost — along with personal and professional markers plus cultural references. "There are things, like ‘Disneyland 1955’ and ‘Civil Rights Act 1964,’ where you think, ‘How did that affect us? What did he mean by that?’ " These puzzles, Nancy says, are "a way of having the artist’s hand in our portrait."

Despite disclosing many details about the couple — that Bob is a distinguished alumnus of the University of Florida and Nancy was once named Outstanding Woman of Miami, for instance — the understated piece does not reveal the decidedly provocative aesthetic informing the bulk of the couple’s holdings. "I think the collection’s themes are politics and humor, and there’s a sexiness to it," says Nancy, who is president of the board of the Aspen Art Museum, known for its commitment to contemporary artists. That same dedication to new talent is evident in the Magoons’s 11,000-square-foot house, where all but a few of their 300 or so artworks are on display.

Prominent in their trove are pieces by such 1990s British darlings as Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Gary Hume, all of whom were introduced to the couple by the dealer Jay Jopling, of London’s White Cube gallery. Emin’s Garden of Horror, 1998, a blanket emblazoned with appliqué declarations like "You Don’t Fuck Me Over" and "Just Let Me Enjoy It," is draped across their bed. Hanging in the stairwell is "If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be," 13 watercolors originally painted by Adolf Hitler that were altered in 2008 with candy-colored rainbows and peace signs by Jake and Dinos Chapman, also represented by Jopling. The series elicits strong reactions. "I’m not religious, but I am Jewish, and some of my Jewish friends could not understand why I bought these," says Nancy. "But it’s not like the money is going to the Nazis — it’s going to the Chapman brothers."

Other examples from the couple’s collection shock not by their political incorrectness but by their graphic sexuality, like Paul McCarthy’s literally titled red silicone and rubber bust Dick Eye, 2002, displayed on a table facing the entryway, and, in an upstairs gallery area, Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s 2007 Pink Narcissus (Version 2), consisting of a light shining on an arrangement of pink silicone fingers and penises that casts a shadow in the form of the artists’s heads.

Art covers every inch of the house, even the home gym, which is filled with small works displayed in a crowded salon manner. In the kitchen is Amy Adler’s Centerfold #2, 2002, depicting the artist, nude from the waist down, flirtatiously eating a banana while lying on her stomach. Overhead hangs The Other Half, 2004, by John Miller: a Styrofoam sphere divided into a cornucopia of fake fruit and a half-globe dotted with miniature houses.

Although expertly arranged, the Magoons’s artworks have a collective impact that goes beyond the purely decorative. "If there is a bunch of flowers on the wall, you walk by them and say, ‘That’s pretty,’ but that’s the end of it," says Nancy. "I think our art prompts discussion, and that’s what makes it stimulating." The couple seeks out artists who have powerful points of view. "A lot of the work that I appreciate is by women and by minorities, by black artists like David Hammons, Gary Simmons, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker," she says, standing beside Ligon’s 1999 Untitled, Stranger in the Village, #15 in a room upstairs. The painting incorporates coal dust and black tar and quotes from James Baldwin’s poem of the same name about the writer’s feeling of isolation as the sole African-American man living in a Swiss hamlet in the 1950s. "I guess I’m drawn to people whose lives have been a lot rougher than mine," she says. "They have a lot to say."