Art dealer Karl Bornstein looked into his wastebasket and knew in an instant that he had something.
"I found just the man I'd been looking for," he says, "a cross between Roy Lichtenstein and Leonardo da Vinci." The man was Patrick Nagel. He had stopped by Bornstein's Hollywood office in 1974 to peddle the woodblock-inspired renderings he did when he wasn't teaching drawing. The work that would soon become ubiquitous in beauty salon windows so underwhelmed Bornstein's secretary that she tossed them as soon as Nagel left.
But in his trash Bornstein saw a promo sheet for an emerging market--young, not altogether upwardly mobile professionals who yearned for a better class of art than museum exhibition prints. Promising to make Nagel famous, he came up with a plan: Restrict supply by issuing only limited-edition series, then whip up demand through product placement. David Copperfield made a plane painted by Nagel disappear on a TV special. And the artist did a Duran Duran album cover as well as monthly illustrations for Playboy.
LeRoy Neiman, Playboy's onetime artist-in-residence, is still a fan: "A Nagel is a Nagel. Often imitated but never replaced."
As sales took off, Nagel earned his celebrity strokes with commissioned portraits of Whitney Houston and Joan Collins, who showed hers to Johnny Carson during a "Tonight Show" guest spot. UCLA's Fredrick S. White Museum eventually displayed a one-man show of Nagel originals.
