KSuccessful surnames are their own currency for auction houses. Some names immediately set off chains of associations in which success, wealth, taste, but also strife and decline are the keywords. This is priceless for direct marketing at the auction desk.
When Sotheby’s was able to auction off Harry Macklowe’s collection for $676 million last fall, the great interest in the auction was of course due to the fact that the billionaire real estate developer owned some excellent works of art by Mark Rothko and Alberto Giacometti, for example. But even more conducive to attention was the fact that he and his wife Linda had organized a bitter War of the Roses, which had to be financed with the auction of their joint collection.
The fall 2018 auction of Peggy and David Rockefeller’s collection was even more lucrative, raising $835 million. And it didn’t even have to do dirty laundry. The Rockefellers owned a fantastic collection and were considered important patrons of culture and patrons.
For Christie’s auction house, which manages the family’s estate and is based in New York’s Rockefeller Center, the record sale of the well-known collection was a home game. Christie’s now wants to build on the Rockefeller success – with the auction of the collection of Ann and Gordon Getty.
View into the house of Ann and Gordon Getty in San Francisco – and a veduta by Canaletto
Quelle: © Christie’s Images Limited 2022
Hardly any other family in the United States of America is so associated with economic and financial power, strokes of fate and pronounced philanthropism as the Gettys. Especially with Jean Paul Getty, the patriarch of the family, who made his money with oil, was considered the wealthiest man in the world in the 1960s and tried to compensate for his emotional hardship towards his children with generous cultural sponsorship. The Getty Center, for example, has towered over Los Angeles since 1997 and includes a collection museum as well as an important research institution.
At least the philanthropist gene has passed on to Getty Senior’s children. With Gordon – after the death of his father he managed his two billion fortune and added another ten billion dollars with the sale of Getty Oil to Texaco – it also became dominant under the influence of his wife Ann. Because after her death in 2020, the joint art collection will go under the hammer for charitable purposes.
Getty auction: Expected $180 million
Collecting artworks, outfitting her residencies and building a social career, think of Ann Getty as a driving force. Gordon Getty praises “her exquisite eye”, which was as keen for outstanding handicrafts from all over the world as for western-dominated art history. The more than 1500 works are offered in several auctions: English furniture, European court art, Asian art and Chinese export porcelain, silver, textiles, Old Masters and Impressionist paintings.
The first auction will take place in October 2022 at Rockefeller Center, initially only objects from the Gettys’ main residence in San Francisco will be auctioned. The English-style townhouse in the heart of the Pacific Heights district is considered one of America’s most famous interiors. Venetian vedutas by Canaletto, 19th-century pastels and classical modernist paintings by Henri Matisse and Mary Cassatt hung on the walls.
Henri Matisse, “Chrysanthemums in a Chinese Vase”
Quelle: © Christie’s Images Limited 2022
Ann Getty clearly had no qualms about cultural appropriation, which any interior designer today would moralize about when mixing eras and styles, objects from India and Imperial China, the Ottoman Empire and the French colonial empire. Matisse may serve as a character witness for this impartial “eye”: a Fauvist bouquet “Chrysanthemums in a Chinese Vase” from 1902, which still quotes the exoticism of the 19th century, but already anticipates the expressionism of European painting.
Mary Cassatt’s “Young Woman with a Fan” will also attract great interest as another main lot in the auction. The impressionist from Pittsburgh was rediscovered only recently and most recently celebrated in an exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler. Cassatt primarily painted women, often mothers with children, in a middle-class atmosphere.
The painting was first owned in 1879 by Paul Gauguin, who praised Cassatt as being just as charming as her male painter colleagues, but far more powerful. From today’s perspective, praise from Gauguin, who seems discredited because of his way of life in the South Seas, may appear as a flaw. Ann Getty hung the picture in her bedroom for decades.
Mary Cassatt, „Young Lady in a Loge Gazing to Right“
Quelle: © Christie’s Images Limited 2022
Auction houses not only sell the works of art, but also the aura of their famous provenance. And the name Ann Getty represents a twist on the American Dream. Born Ann Gilbert, daughter of a California nut farmer, she is said to be a shy and beautiful small-town girl who, in 1964, was fortunate enough to marry one of the most eligible sons of a billionaire in the country. For twenty years she raised four sons, represented a household, gave magnificent parties, commuted between San Francisco, New York and the major music festivals in Europe in her own Boeing 727, and was soon called “Jetty”.
When she met the Austro-British publicist and diplomat George Weidenfeld in the 1980s, she found an intellectual calling. Together they bought Grove Press, and Getty became a publisher for a decade. Art – and how best to place it – became so dominant in her life by the 1990s that Ann Getty even started an interior design company.
But as the owner of an important private collection in Germany recently said – “Collectors don’t stay, only the art stays” (Christian Boros) – so it is with the “Ann & Gordon Getty Collection”. She will scatter and come into new collections. The auction house expects proceeds of 180 million dollars, which will flow into the family foundation, founded in 1976, which is dedicated to supporting orchestras, opera houses, but also educational institutions and scientific organizations.