Reporting from New York and Los Angeles — — Henry Clay Frick, J. Pierpont Morgan, Louisine and Henry O. Havemeyer in New York; J. Paul Getty, Norton Simon, Arabella and Henry E. Huntington in Los Angeles; Andrew W. Mellon in Washington, D.C.; Claribel and Etta Cone in Baltimore. Big names in the art world — and merely a sampling of Americans whose art collections have shaped the nation's museums.
The artistic legacies of American collectors get serious attention in scholarly circles. The back story is another matter. Biographers and journalists may revel in the messy business of how and why rich and powerful Americans spend fortunes on Rembrandts, Monets, Picassos and Rauschenbergs. Art historians tend to concentrate on connoisseurship and aesthetics.
That's beginning to change. Thanks to expanding views of art history, a fresh crop of scholars intrigued with the socioeconomic context of collecting and the provenance of art objects are giving American collectors a new level of scrutiny and respect.
"The history of collecting is so deliciously interdisciplinary," says Inge Reist, who directs the fledgling Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Collection in New York. "It opens so many doors." The center was established in 2007, after years of planning, "to stimulate awareness and study of the formation of fine and decorative arts collections from colonial times to the present, while asserting the relevance of this subject to art and cultural history."
It's an idea whose time has finally come, says Jonathan Brown, a professor at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts who teaches seminars on American collecting and played a leading role in the formation of the Frick's research center.
"If you turn the clock back to 1880, the United States of America is a small country and the first gigantic fortunes are just in the process of being made," he says. "There's a sense on the part of the industrialists that the United States should have a high culture. Thirty to 40 years later, by 1920, they had imported a great deal of Europe's patrimony."
America developed an entrepreneurial style of collecting that continues today with power brokers and arts patrons playing enormous roles in the cultural lives of their cities. Billionaire Eli Broad bankrolled a building bearing his name at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but dashed hopes that his contemporary collection would go there and is planning to build his own museum at a yet-to-be-designated location in the L.A. area. The late Donald Fisher, who founded Gap Inc. with his wife, Doris, struck a deal that will make his contemporary art holding the centerpiece of a new wing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — after a plan to erect a showcase for the collection at the Presidio was defeated by neighborhood protests.
But until recently, Brown says, "the history of collecting in the United States hadn't even been defined as a subject, whereas in Europe it was quite advanced. The feats of American collectors were more than equal to what had gone on in the great centers of Europe, but scholars who habitually studied collecting in Spain or France or England never got their minds around the United States as a comparable example."
"Who buys what is inherently interesting," he says. "It's how culture puts its values on display. What distinguishes American collecting is a sense of the public good. The idea that collections would not only enhance the reputations of the collectors, but one way or another they would come into the public domain and provide an uplifting element to the American experience. There are a thousand and one fascinating tales that can be told."
In Los Angeles alone, there is much to be learned about collectors who donated art to the forerunner of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in Exposition Park, and supporters of the Pasadena Art Museum who switched their allegiance to the fledgling Museum of Contemporary Art when Norton Simon took charge of the Pasadena institution.
One signal prototype of American collecting was Frick himself, a man of modest origin who built a great fortune and then left his remarkable collection to the public.
The Pittsburgh coke and steel industrialist began collecting in 1881. At his death, in 1919, he bequeathed his New York City mansion, furnishings and collection of paintings, sculpture and decorative arts to be established as a public art gallery. His daughter, Helen Clay Frick, founded the reference library in 1920.
The art collection and the library's holding of more than 250,000 books and periodicals, 80,000 auction catalogs and a million photographs — much of it pertaining to American collecting — made the Frick an ideal location for the new research center, Reist says.
