Bruce Chatwin’s 1988 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Utz tells the tale of a Prague-based collector of Meissen porcelain who, at the end of the Second World War, finds himself and his collection on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. He considers defecting, and has the means and opportunity to do so, but he knows he would be unable to take his collection with him. Nonetheless he makes annual attempts, and starts building a comparable collection in the West, hoping perhaps it will entice him to make the permanent leap – instead, he finds himself smuggling porcelain into the East. Finally, he marries his cleaning lady, just so he doesn’t have to downsize to a one-bedroom flat, which would have lost him space for the Meissen.
‘Collecting’ is often mooted as a means of improving our interiors by adding interest and personality, but this focused approach – which Paul van den Biesen, Head of Collectors & Museum Development at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF), a veritable Mecca for those who want the best of the best, calls “connoisseur collecting” – is on a different level. Paul likens it to “falling in love with a person, you think about them all of the time.” And it’s worth examining, for although Utz is fictional, it could easily be true, and similar stories abound surrounding obsessive acquisition.
Some accounts hint at the illegal – at fraud, bootlegging, and stealing to order (there’s still a reward of $10 million available to anyone who chances upon Vermeer’s The Concert.) Others are above board, though no less extraordinary: there are collectors whose enthusiasm has led them to bid against themselves at auction, forgetting that they’d already laid down a reserve. There’s the case of a Turkish collector whose wife bought the Chagall that he had put up for sale – she saw it, loved it, and didn’t remember that she already owned it. Alison Morris of Endlings in Hastings – where she sells the early and mid-20th-century prints, paintings and textiles that she collects – tells of a collector of 18th-century French furniture who, in his own home, combined it with the cheapest, most functional plastic furniture, because he simply didn’t see the point in anything in between – and Gertrude Stein famously said “you can either buy clothes or you can buy pictures.” But such extreme dichotomy is not necessarily essential and if you keep within the bounds of the law (and remember when you’ve put down reserve bids) it becomes clear that there are many benefits to such concentrated amassing. Firstly, to society – “specialist collecting adds something to the world,” says Paul – and secondly, for us.
The interest might be on 17th- and 18th-century Maastricht silver. It might be on paintings by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett Haines – who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing (alma mater of Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling) – but only from the period when they were living in Newlyn in Cornwall. It might be on hunt buttons, a vast single collection – including buttons from a Maharajah’s hunt in India – is coming up for sale at Chorley’s in March. Or, as in the case of Nathalie Farman-Farma, it might be on the tribal robes of Central Asia. Whatever it is, it very definitely is not, as the collector Tiqui Atencio describes in her book Could Have, Would Have, Should Have: Inside the World of the Art Collector, “randomly buying things willy nilly to fill an empty space.” Rather, it is the pursuit of things that relate to one another – and in doing so tell a more complete story, so that the collection becomes significantly more than the sum of its parts.
It is here that we see the benefit to the world: it is often a collector who will become the leading expert on their chosen area, largely because they have the time, the wherewithal, and the interest to see and find connections that others might miss. Paul Kerckchoffs, an Amsterdam-based lawyer, has written a widely well-respected book on his collection of Maastricht silver, and has given the collection to the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. Publishing, along with lending to institutions prior to bequeathing entire collections, is happily not uncommon, and many of our leading museums owe their contents, and even existence, to such collectors’ generosity. Then, when it comes to contemporary art, a collector’s impact can be vital: Gertrude Stein’s collecting of Picasso in his early years – and placing of his works alongside paintings she owned by Gauguin, Cezanne, and Renoir – aided his meteoric rise. Would it have happened anyway? Who knows. Did Picasso radically alter the trajectory of 20th-century art? Definitely.
There are some whose interpretation of Utz leads them to see the Meissen collection as a form of imprisonment, akin to the communist state. Others – undoubtedly the collectors and want-to-be collectors among us – read it as a great romance. For, to enlarge on the benefits that such focussed collecting can bring us, Gertrude Stein credits her art collecting (and specifically Matisse) with the beginning of her famous salons that undoubtedly aided her writing. Paul Kerkschoffs has combined his interest in collecting with his experience in law to create a firm that marries the two; Provenance+ specialises in providing provenance for art and collectibles. Nathalie Farman-Farma has explained how her collection of tribal robes inspired the founding of her fabric line, Décors Barbares. And many collectors become dealers – another means of practicing work-life integration. Alongside is the social aspect (sale rooms and fairs can genuinely be a riot), the travel, the purpose and the sheer joy that comes from “going beneath the surface, to the bottomless depths,” describes Paul van den Biesen. As John Getty said, collecting adds “breadth and depth to one’s whole existence.”
So what is required? Reassuringly, you don’t necessarily have to have bottomless pockets. Ticqui recounts the restaurateur and collector Michael Chow telling her that of the attributes a collector needs, namely knowledge, courage, an eye and money, “money is the least important. The crucial quality is the eye” – which, he says, can be trained, while knowledge can be acquired. The courage refers to the fact that “every collector will one day find themselves with a chance to buy something they cannot afford – and the great collectors always take that opportunity.” Notable – in terms of finances – is that Picasso wasn’t expensive when Gertrude Stein bought her first piece by him in 1905; when Ernest Hemmingway later told her he couldn’t afford to buy his paintings – a conversation he reported in A Moveable Feast – she replied, simply, “No. He’s out of your range. You have to buy the people of your own age.” But perhaps the best advice, certainly for beginners, came from Robert Kime and his philosophy of being “open and interested” – though, in this instance, add the words “and focused.”
TEFAF takes place in Maastricht March 9-14
