COLLECTORS
David Levine, Caricature of Douglas Cooper, pen and ink, 1989
After an article on Castille—“Le Château des Cubistes”—appeared in L’Oeil magazine, collectors and dealers and curiosity-seekers, mostly American, descended on us in droves. Douglas enjoyed this. He liked showing his collection to people who knew what they were looking at, or to students who wanted to learn. But what gave him the greatest satisfaction was having his brain picked by collectors, dealers, and museum directors. He had come to see himself as the Berenson of cubism. When pilgrims arrived, he would preen with pleasure, flattered by their attentions into being infinitely helpful: “Don’t make an offer on that drawing until I’ve asked Pablo about it.” But woe betide me if I dared to interject a view of my own, or, as I was sometimes tempted to do, correct Douglas, who was a bit vague about technical procedures. He would give me an “Aren’t we getting above ourselves?” look and suggest I see if someone needed a drink.
A few of these visitors—notably Victor and Sally Ganz, who struck both of us as far and away the most perceptive and courageous of the new generation of American collectors—would become close friends. Others, and by no means the least interesting ones, would turn out to be unscrupulous operators who sucked up to Douglas for the free advice and studio gossip that he dispensed. The most persistent of these was a zircon in the rough from Pittsburgh called Dave Thompson, who looked like the very successful scrap-iron dealer he had formerly been, and who fancied himself, with some justice, as a latter-day Dr. Albert Barnes, the Philadelphia collector who outdid all others in rapacity and beastliness. As with Barnes, Dave’s passion for collecting was born of resentment—resentment of stuffy Pittsburgh society, which had supposedly scorned him. (Not entirely justified, a Pittsburgh friend told me. It was Dave’s aggressiveness and bragging, not his humble origins, that made him persona non grata. Before anyone could snub him, he would have snubbed them.) To get back at the old guard, Dave set about trouncing them in the field of modern art—the one field where the old guard would not have noticed or cared whether they had been trounced or not.
Like many a new collector, Dave had started off in the relatively easy area of Americana, where he is said to have done very well. But he soon abandoned Americana for modernism, and in this infinitely tricky area he applied the same ruthlessness and canniness that had enabled him to make a fortune in scrap iron during World War II to making a fortune in Picassos and Klees and Giacomettis after the war was over. Dave called it “collecting”; most other people would have called it “dealing.” Some of his victims might even have called it “fleecing.” (A Danish doctor who told Dave that his Klee meant so much to him he would never sell it, but only give it away, was horrified when Dave said thank you and walked off with it.) By the early 1950s, prices for modern art were already on the rise but still astonishingly low, and a goodish Picasso or Matisse could still be acquired for around $20,000. In the absence of much aesthetic discernment, a flair for the market stood Dave in good stead; so did his personal schlepper, a fat little German woman who scoured European dealers and auction houses for him. Dave used many of the same brash, bullying methods that had made Barnes so loathed, notably bulk-buying. “What isn’t selling? Late Klee, maybe? Okay, I’ll take everything.” Beyeler, the formidable Swiss dealer who remembers Dave saying this, rates him as a “truly vicious” buyer. Nevertheless, it was Beyeler who ultimately benefited from Dave’s depredations, for it was he who sold his 100 Klees en bloc to the Düsseldorf Museum, and his 70 Giacomettis—the biggest privately owned group of the artist’s work—to a consortium of Swiss museums. And it was Beyeler who handled a great many of the 340 works remaining in what was, albeit briefly, the largest collection of modern masters in the world.
Dave’s eye was far from dependable, so he would usually call Douglas before making an acquisition. Everything about a painting had to be “right”: the period, the provenance, the condition, the subject, the size, and above all the price. More than once, Douglas saved Dave from making a costly mistake; and since Dave was far from generous, Douglas was sometimes obliged to insinuate himself into a deal so that he, too, could make some money. Otherwise compensation took the form of Countess Mara ties—“Unwearable and, worse, ungiveawayable,” Douglas would shudder—and overelaborate dinners in three-star tourist traps. Since Dave enjoyed being the center of attention, he liked each course—on one occasion even the soup—to be flambé. People at neighboring tables would titter as blue flames would erupt yet again from our vicinity, and Dave would pyromaniacally urge the waiters to keep the sea bass or the crêpes suzette ablaze. Later we would have to go back to his hotel to inspect some new acquisition. On one of these occasions he started making snarling noises and tearing the bed apart the moment he entered his room.
“What on earth are you doing?” Douglas asked.
“Getting back at the French for having such filthy minds,” Dave said. “Didn’t you see the sheets were turned down on both sides of the bed? Well, that filthy-minded maid is going to have to make it up again properly.”
Dave, it appeared, suffered from blue-collar prudery and could not forgive the implication that he was sharing a bed with the woman he would eventually marry. That Helen had the room next door was clearly anything but a fiction. “You’ve got to stop being such a hick,” Douglas said. To cover his embarrassment, Dave showed us a Miró he had bought that morning. “What is more,” Douglas went on, “you’ve got to stop being such a sucker. That Miró’s not a Miró.”
Much as Dr. Barnes had liked to raise and then dash hopes, Dave entered into negotiations with his local museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, regarding its possible acquisition of his collection. He even took the director and his wife on trips to Europe, only in the end to renege on what would have been a great coup for Pittsburgh. Why, Dave said, should the city that had snubbed him get his treasures? Far more kudos would accrue from donating a painting to the Museum of Modern Art. By giving his great 1906 Picasso, Two Nudes, to MoMA “in honor of Alfred Barr,” Dave won himself a prestigious place in New York’s art establishment.
And then one morning we got a frantic call from Dave. Thieves had broken into his suburban house (Stone’s Throw, it was called), ripped some of his best paintings from their stretchers, and made off with them. Dave had received a ransom note asking for a largish sum of money to be paid into a numbered Swiss bank account, but when he asked his bank to wire the money, he met with a rebuff.
“Buying more pictures?” the bank manager had asked.
“No, ransoming some back,” Dave replied.
“In that case we cannot act for you.” Banks are not allowed knowingly to sanction payments to criminals, the manager explained. The matter had to be referred to the FBI. In due course, the paintings mysteriously returned to Dave’s walls. How did this come about? A friend in the FBI called Joe Chapman eventually filled me in.
Dave was too volatile to be allowed any role in the negotiations, so Joe had to install himself in a New York hotel and assume Dave’s identity. Easy, he said: all he did was throw his weight around and behave “like a prick.” The thieves lost no time in contacting him. They instructed the man they thought was Dave to leave a message in the pages of a telephone directory at the New York Public Library. FBI operatives had the place staked out, and when someone picked up the message, they followed him back to Philadelphia and easily identified the rest of the gang. One of them had been newly released from prison as well as newly wed. Persuading him to rat on his accomplices was easy, though he may have been killed for doing so. The FBI rounded up the crooks and retrieved the paintings. They were even able to identify the man who had masterminded the theft, but were unable for some reason to bring him to justice. Who was he? I asked Joe. A very respected member of the art world. Did I know him? Probably, Joe said, but that was all he would divulge.
Sheer luck and a little amateur sleuthing enabled me years later to identify the mastermind. I was having the kitchen of my New York apartment painted by a young pop artist, whose subject matter was so outrageous that he sold very little and lived by painting houses by day and hustling by night. Beau was a spotty decorator but an enthralling raconteur. “I bet you know some of my art world clients,” he said. And he went on to regale me with stories about a heavily married art historian of utmost respectability, who had a taste for young hoods. “The badder, the better,” Beau said, “but I find him kids who are reasonably safe—don’t want any trouble.” I did indeed know the art historian in question: a very reputable man, whom I knew to have been badly used by Dave and in need of money. Everything fitted: I realized that he must have planned the theft.
Next time Joe and I had lunch, I brought the subject around to Dave. Was the mastermind married? I asked. Joe thought as much. It was so-and-so, wasn’t it? Joe pulled out his diary and erased the entry that recorded our meeting. This lunch never took place, he said as he hurried out.
Back, however, to Douglas’s relationship with Dave. They were too alike in certain respects, too combustible for safety. A flare-up was inevitable. Dave was always pushing Douglas to sell him a work from his collection, so when Douglas needed money to finance some deal or other, what more natural than that he should turn to Dave? The only important painting he could bear to part with was a handsome, rather decorative still life by Juan Gris, which Dave had often admired. After much haggling, the two of them finally agreed on a price. And since Dave was in a hurry for the painting, and Douglas was in a hurry for the money, he shipped it off to Pittsburgh by express. A mistake. The promised check failed to materialize. When Douglas expostulated, Dave claimed that he would never have bought the painting if he had known Douglas was so hard up. That rankled, more especially since Douglas knew that if he fired off one of his wounding salvos, the check would take even longer to materialize. Henceforth he would resent yet respect Dave rather more than before.
When Douglas arranged for Dave to buy Feuerwerke, the little Klee he had given me, things went more smoothly, except that Dave would ultimately emerge from the transaction as even more of a crook than I had thought. Next time I saw Feuerwerke, it had grown to almost twice its original size. Dave had had a “restorer” enlarge the brown night-sky background by several inches. (I am glad to say the addition has now been removed.) How many other works, I wondered, had had their value increased in this way? And how ironic this enlargement was. When the paintings that the thieves had cut from their stretchers were returned to Dave, they were quite a bit smaller than before.
Another American collector for whom Douglas had a very special regard was a Chicagoan called Morton Neumann. Picasso, who introduced us to him, described Morton as “un vrai numéro,” who had made a fortune out of a product that straightened kinky hair. He was much more interesting, Picasso said, than most of Alfred Barr’s flock of obedient sheep, who all looked the same, sounded the same, and wanted to buy the same thing. “Neumann is his own man.” He certainly was.
Paul Klee, Feuerwerke, mixed media, 1930
The Neumanns had won Picasso’s heart by giving him half a dozen cheap watches, with the twelve letters of the artist’s name in place of numerals. Picasso was tickled. At a bullfight we attended a few weeks later, he presented one of the Neumann watches to a torero who had dedicated a bull to him. (Not to be outdone, Cocteau tore off his gold Rolex, while his companion, Francine Weisweiller, threw her emerald earrings in the direction of the bullfighter. Surprisingly, she got them back.) And then the artist had been much amused when he offered Rose Neumann a cigarette. She said she wouldn’t let something he had given her go up in smoke; he had to sign it. When Picasso heard that Rose kept the signed Gauloise on a little red velvet cushion under a glass cloche in the middle of her Picasso-filled living room, he liked the Neumanns even more.
In the course of a luncheon to which Picasso had asked the Neumanns and Douglas and me, I discovered a further reason for this friendship. Picasso was convinced that Morton was taken in by his mimicry of English. Although the artist knew next to no English, he could improvise gibberish that sounded extraordinarily like the real thing (thanks to his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, Picasso could do the same in Russian). “Morton is convinced we understand each other’s English,” he said. And sure enough, by modulating his voice and expression and raising or lowering his voice at the end of a sentence or shrugging his shoulders, Picasso seemed able to manipulate his Chicago friend into answering “yeah,” or “sure,” or “hell no,” to his quasi-English mumbling. But the more I listened, the more I realized that, far from being taken in, Morton was fooling Picasso into believing that he, Morton, was the one being fooled.
When I visited Chicago a year or two later, I was amazed at the extent of the Neumanns’ collection. Besides acquiring a roomful of Picassos, Morton had made friends with Tristan Tzara and Man Ray, and they had helped him put together a group of Dada and surrealist treasures. The collection also included seventeen mostly major Mirós, several superb Giacomettis, rather too many Dubuffets for my taste, key paintings by Gris, Léger, Mondrian, Chirico, and much, much more. On subsequent visits, I was amazed to find Morton always ahead of the game. He was a pioneer collector of virtually every avant-garde movement of the sixties, seventies, and eighties: op art, pop art, photorealism, neo-Dadaism, and so on. New acquisitions (including some fifty Malcolm Morleys) overflowed closets, hung on doors, dangled from ceilings, leaned against windows, accumulated on chairs. On our way to dinner at the Standard Club, I was unnerved by a sinister-looking rubber bag in the back of Morton’s car. It gurgled and smelled funny. One never knew with Morton—was it perhaps some new form of art? No, it was the cadaver of a cat, on which the Neumanns’ medical student son had been honing his skills.
After visiting Picasso at Cannes, we would often drive on to Roquebrune to see a fascinating couple, Emery and Wendy Reves. Born in Hungary, Emery had made a fortune brokering the memoirs of Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, and other wartime leaders to newspaper and magazine publishers all over the world. In doing so he had become their close friend and adviser, as an impressive display of memorabilia confirmed. Emery was a perfectionist, but much more relaxed than most. Likewise Wendy, who was—indeed still is—a fragile blond beauty with a taste for pale pastel colors and a fund of down-to-earth Texan wit. Their small collection of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings—Manet, Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Bonnard—was of the most rarefied quality. And the life they led at La Pausa—the white marble villa the Duke of Westminster had built for Chanel—was as idyllic as anybody could possibly want. Wonderfully comfortable rooms gave onto a central courtyard, in the middle of which stood a large white marble figure by Rodin. The setting was no less idyllic: a grove of ancient olive trees amid row upon row of immaculately trimmed lavender bushes. All La Pausa lacked, Douglas said, was something ugly—the glimpse of a billboard or a gas station—to exorcise the too-good-to-be-true look.
Winston Churchill, his daughter Sarah, and Emery Reves at the Villa La Pausa, 1957
At the end of his long life, Churchill was so besotted by the delights of La Pausa and the charms of the maîtresse de maison that he settled into the house for weeks and sometimes months at a time. Emery knew just how to indulge this exceedingly spoiled, increasingly babyish eighty-something-year-old. He would engage a star chef from the Château de Madrid and lay on the lashings of brandy, champagne, and cigars to which his eminent guest was addicted. But what Churchill liked best was to sit under an umbrella in the beautiful garden with the adorable Wendy at his side and daub away in the sunlight. The great man’s pet budgerigar, Toby, would twitter away and sometimes, it was said, nest in Wendy’s pale blond hair. On one occasion the bird was left behind in London, and, unbeknownst to British taxpayers, Churchill’s official plane had to fly back to retrieve it. Lady Churchill told my old friend June Churchill (second wife of Winston’s son Randolph) that she did not approve of her husband’s crush on “Windy,” as she chose to call her. Insofar as she could, Lady Churchill kept away from La Pausa. Churchill did not seem to mind.
One summer morning, Douglas and I drove over to La Pausa to look at a painting that Emery was thinking of buying. He introduced us to the great man, who was taking his ease on a terrace with Wendy and Winnie. I was worried that Douglas might be obstreperous, but for once he behaved like a starstruck little boy.
“Why don’t you both stay for lunch?” Emery asked Douglas. “You’ll amuse Winston, and he’ll enthrall you.”
“Sorry, Emery, we’re lunching with Picasso.” Douglas could not resist raising his voice in the hope that Churchill would hear. And back we drove to Cannes, Douglas agog to tell the artist that we had turned Churchill down for him. “I should hope so,” Picasso said. “Didn’t we have a date? Maybe you should have brought him along. After all his conneries about my painting, he should hear what I think of his.”