Everyone knows Steve Martin is funny. Fewer people know he’s spent over fifty years building one of the most respected private art collections around.
By Watson Evans Art
Everyone knows Steve Martin is funny. Fewer people know he’s spent over fifty years building one of the most respected private art collections around.
It started when he was twenty-one, with a small painting from an antique shop that he still owns (and that’s worth less now than he paid for it). Today, his collection reads like the wing of an art gallery. Pablo Picasso, Edward Hopper, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Cindy Sherman.
The part I find most telling is his love of Aboriginal art. He read about a show in the paper, cycled over, bought a piece and now he and his wife own around a hundred of them. He lends them out so the artists get seen and hangs them right beside his Hoppers and Hockneys. No hierarchy. Great art is great art.
Which is really the whole point of collecting. Not the names, not the money. Buying what moves you and living with it.
Who should I cover next?