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."

Nancy, born and raised in New York City, possesses a Manhattanite’s urbanity. Her father was the late Jack Parker, who founded the company that owns Le Parker Meridien hotel, in New York, and the Parker Palm Springs, in California, among other real estate (and which is now run by her son from her second marriage, Adam Glick). Despite the decades she’s spent collecting, art was not part of her upbringing. "My parents were interested in golf, period," she says, adding that it was when she was living in New York with her first husband, Michael Gross, a civil rights attorney who grew up in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in New Jersey, that she developed what became her lifelong passion. "Every weekend we would go to the Museum of Modern Art, and I fell in love with the act of looking at art, the quiet, the peace it brought me."

Nancy met Bob, her third husband, through mutual friends in the early 1970s, when they were both recently divorced and living in Miami with two children each. Bob, a tall, unassuming man who leaves most of the collecting decisions to Nancy, grew up in Miami Beach. His sportsmanship is on proud display in his home office, where a poster commemorating his record-setting victory in a 1974 powerboat race from Miami to New York is tacked up beside a cluster of trophies from similar competitions. As for art, once Nancy started "dragging him to museums, he got the bug too," she says.

It was upon her move to Miami that Nancy established herself as a serious collector. She worked there for the dealer Dorothy Blau, who is now in her 80s and still runs a gallery in Bal Harbour, Florida. Blau, says Nancy, "loved Andy Warhol long before anyone had heard of him," and in 1979, the artist came to the gallery to create several commissioned portraits, including one of Nancy that today graces a small sitting area in the master bedroom. "He said to me, ‘What color background do you want?’ " she recalls. "And I said red and purple, so I got blue and green." Warhol charged her $25,000 for the pair, and Nancy notes that one of the women who had her portraits done at the same time just sold them for $800,000.

While at Blau’s gallery, Nancy became involved with the Miami Art Museum and befriended one of its curators, Louis Grachos, who is now the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, New York. Grachos inspired her to rethink her collecting strategy, which to that point had favored established postwar artists such as Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers, Frank Stella and Warhol. "One of the trips we took was to the Rubell Family Collection, and it just blew me away. From that point on, I made up my mind to just collect young artists," says Nancy, who still owns a few of her first acquisitions, including Roy Lichtenstein’s Mirror, 1970. A gift from her father, the work hangs to the left of the fireplace, beside a Damien Hirst butterfly painting.

Many of Nancy’s pieces are showcased in the house’s large, airy ground floor and the exposed second-floor atrium overlooking it, where they are shielded somewhat from the sunlight pouring in through the enormous windows that frame the downstairs. One of the most eye-catching works in the upstairs space is Yasumasa Morimura’s Futago, 1988-90, a photographic reconstruction of Manet’s Olympia in which the Japanese artist poses as both the nude odalisque and her black handmaid.

The furniture throughout the white-walled house is minimal, but some pieces are as collectible as the art. Among these are examples by such important 1940s French figures as Serge Mouille, Jean Prouvé and Jean Royére, including, in the kitchen, Prouvé chairs that came from an old schoolhouse, which the couple bought from the New York dealer Cristina Grajales.

When the Magoons decided to live-full time in Colorado, 18 years ago, they hired the Aspen architect Stan Mathis to build over the small, Western-style bungalow that had been their vacation home. "We love to entertain and to live with art, and we wanted to take advantage of the views, which are spectacular," says Nancy. "Stan listened to us — the design is about us and not him."

The couple’s hosting commitments encompass functions both for family and on behalf of the Aspen museum, to which they have strong ties. Nancy is close to Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, the institution’s director and chief curator, who has exposed her to such emerging artists as Pawel Althamer and Simon Evans. And the Magoons are on the committee for the museum’s annual summer artCRUSH benefit, which is sponsored by Sotheby’s. The couple has made purchases through the event’s charity auction and also enjoy making the rounds at art fairs, such as Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, where they frequent the booths of New York dealers like Andrea Rosen and Barbara Gladstone. It was Gladstone who beckoned Nancy into her gallery 15 years ago and introduced her to the work of the then-unknown Matthew Barney; Nancy purchased the artist’s rare early drawing Envelopa, Drawing Restraint 7, Achilles, 1992, for $5,000.

Trusted dealers and art world colleagues aren’t the only influences on Bob and Nancy’s collecting; their decisions are shaped by their surroundings as well. Living year-round in Aspen has encouraged the couple to let their trove spill out into their six-acre backyard, where sculptures by Willie Cole, Tony Cragg, Ugo Rondinone and Not Vital, among others, can be found. Of course, Aspen’s picturesque views are accompanied by harsh weather, and the Magoons are diligent about monitoring the condition of their outdoor pieces. "It’s not just about buying the art and putting it out there. It comes with responsibility," says Bob. "We have a conservator come once a year and tell us what needs to be done." They’ve had problems with just about every alfresco display, ranging from the rusting of Tony Cragg’s Code Noah, 1988, to the complete collapse, brought on by cold weather, of a spray-painted rock sculpture from Aaron Young’s 2006 "Locals Only" series, which the artist ultimately replaced.

Although it’s rare that the easygoing couple disagree over an artwork, such conflicts have occurred. One involved a piece from their collection of Native American, Egyptian and African tribal art. "We had an African Ekoi head that Bob drove me crazy over because every time he passed it he would say, ‘This is the ugliest piece I’ve ever seen.’ So finally I said, ‘Let’s sell it,’ " Nancy recalls. More recently, Bob has expressed reservations about Little Head, Kiki Smith’s eerie 1992 bronze and steel sculpture of a head seemingly detached from its body, which Nancy bought through Dwight Hackett Projects, of Santa Fe, New Mexico. For now, it remains in their collection. "We’ll see if he can live with it," says Nancy, who, after 30 years of marriage, clearly understands the art of compromise.

"The High Life" originally appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July/August 2009 Table of Contents.