Which Collectors Are True Believers in Art?

In June,  in the wake of underwhelming marquee auction results, the art adviser Jacob King sent a memo to his clients with a provocative thesis: Could the mainstreaming of an “investment mindset” be to blame for a market contraction? The spending slowdown on primary market art, King observed, could very well have come about from “feedback loops that caused prices for art to spiral higher, while propelling an ever-greater supply of new material onto the market.” Translation: artists generating works to feed a market that churns through them, with artworks flipped at auction and prices pushed up to unsustainable levels. 

King isn’t the only one who has noted this tendency. Kibum Kim, director at Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles, has observed the rise of an “artificial sense of urgency that doesn’t give people a chance to really dive deeply into an artist’s practice.” Though his gallery stays away from collectors engaged in this mindset, he has seen some making impulse purchases “based on hearsay” rather than on how an artwork resonates with them or how it fits into their collection. 

This past spring, more than one gallerist said that with so many speculators having fled, the collectors who’ve remained in the game are the ones who care about the art, not the investment value—the ones who buy with their eyes, not their ears. ARTnews spoke with a handful of seasoned, highly influential collectors who do not consider collecting to be a financial venture; who purchase works that move them and focus on the civic impact of sharing their collections through museums. Though many in the market associate such an intellectually rigorous approach to collecting and patronage with the 20th century, these true believers have not only blazed a path for a new generation but are also still movers and shakers themselves. “These are passionate collectors—they are never looking at what everyone else is looking at,” says art adviser Allan Schwartzman. “They’re not interested in what the market values. Sometimes what they value aligns with what the market values, but in general they’re more thoughtful in their approach.”

Jill Kraus, the MoMA trustee who, with her husband, Peter, has long appeared on the Top 200 list, has been vocal about this approach to collecting. At the 2023 Bomb magazine benefit, where she and her husband were honored, she recalls, she delivered a speech in which she said, “If you’re an artist, keep creating. If you’re a dealer, stop telling your artists to make the same painting 50 times in 50 different colors. If you’re a collector, buy with your heart and your eyes, not your ears. I’m adamant about this.”

For young collectors, this older generation of “true believer” collectors has long been modeling arts patronage, offering a blueprint for making an impact among both artists and institutions while also following one’s curiosities. “It’s just like going to school,” Schwartzman says. “People need good mentors to do something well that’s moving the needle.” 

Joel Wachs

The president of the Andy Warhol Foundation has been using part of his paycheck to collect art since 1971, when he was elected to the Los Angeles City Council. 

On his last day in Kyoto in the 1960s, 20-something Joel Wachs ducked into a small gallery called the Red Lantern and purchased two etchings for $25 each. Over the next year, the recent law school graduate discovered that he loved living with art, and after joining a law firm that represented artists in Los Angeles, he started frequenting Gemini Graphics, now known as Gemini G.E.L. Inspired by the  story of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel—the civil servant couple who amassed a collection of 4,000 works, all of which they went on to donate—Wachs started putting aside a portion of his income to purchase art when he was elected to the LA City Council in 1971, at the age of 32.

Wachs, who did not grow up around art, first set foot in a contemporary gallery during law school. But he became intrigued by conceptual works when he encountered Sherrie Levine’s 1981 series “After Walker Evans,” for which she rephotographed reproductions of Evans’ most iconic images. “I said, ‘How can this be art, where someone is photographing someone else’s photographs?’” he recalled during a recent interview at his Manhattan apartment, where pieces from his collection cover every vertical surface, including doors (not unlike the way the Vogels displayed their vast collection). After discussing Levine’s concept with Richard Kuhlenschmidt, whose LA gallery was in the basement of his apartment building, Wachs said, “it stayed with me.” He bought it the following week, and, as it turned out, it was the first piece Levine ever sold. “To this day, we’re very close friends,” he said of the artist.

On the City Council, Wachs developed a reputation for supporting the arts community. “When I ran for mayor, Christopher Wool made buttons for me,” he said. “I was what you’d call a really independent voice on the City Council and never befriended the developers.” Roy Lichtenstein, Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly, and David Hockney sold editions at Gemini to benefit Wachs’s campaign. 

In 2001, when Wachs moved to New York to become president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, his collecting budget increased significantly; he now spends half his paycheck on art. Today, his apartment holds 200 works including ones by Jennifer Packer, James Bishop, Mike Kelley, Albert Oehlen, Ed Clark, and David Hammons. There’s a Lee Bontecou sculpture Wachs acquired using $18,000 from an insurance check he received after the 1992 LA earthquake, and a Marisa Merz painting purchased at a fair on the advice of Barbara Gladstone (“If you don’t get it, I will,” Gladstone reportedly said, before negotiating a deal for him). The closet in Wachs’s entryway is a storage space for even more frames.  

“Everything I buy, I buy with the institutions in mind,” Wachs said, referring to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), which he helped found in 1979 and has supported ever since, along with the Hammer Museum. So far, each museum has received 100 works from his collection. Eventually, MOCA will be given his painting and sculpture holdings, while the Hammer will get “all the works on paper—prints, drawings, collage, and photographs,” he said. “I’ve gotten great satisfaction out of not only putting together collections, but also using it to support the very institutions that I supported both in government and now at an art foundation.” 

To this day, Wachs is delighted by the thrill of the find. “I just got the most amazing Blinky Palermo work on paper from 1969,” he said, adding that he’d found it at a small auction house in Belgium. It’s a study for Palermo’s 1970 installation at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, depicting blue isosceles triangles.

Wachs’s philosophy on collecting is not about chasing what everyone else is looking at. “It’s not about what you don’t have. It’s about what you do with what you have,” he said. “You have choices to make.” 

Eileen Harris Norton

Though the LA-based collector has amassed a pioneering collection by women and artists of color, education has been her philanthropic focus.

One afternoon in the late 1970s, while shopping at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw mall in Los Angeles, Eileen Harris Norton and her mother discovered that the second floor of the mall contained LA’s Museum of African American Art. There, they found artist Ruth Waddy making woodblock prints and describing her practice to a group of rapt visitors. Harris Norton was familiar with contemporary art but had never bought an artwork. Waddy’s work captivated her, and, with her mother’s encouragement, she acquired one of Waddy’s prints.

Today, Harris Norton’s collection spans more than 1,100 mostly by artists of color, women artists, and LA artists, including Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, Betye Saar, and Glenn Ligon. “It’s intuition, and it’s my value system,” she said of her approach to collecting.  

During the 1980s, Harris Norton, a teacher, and her then husband Peter Norton, a software engineer and founder of Peter Norton Computing, would frequently tour artists’ studios on the weekends. “We became friendly with this one woman, Carla Pagliaro. And we always said, ‘If we ever have any money, we’re going to buy your work,’ ” Harris Norton said. And as Peter’s company grew, they did just that. The couple’s collecting practice soon veered “tougher” and “more content-laden,” she explained, with Peter “in thrall” to Charles Ray in particular. She purchased some of Walker’s and Simpson’s earliest works. 

“Eileen Harris Norton is a pivotal figure within the arts landscape,” said Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. “Her vital support of countless artists, many of whom are now household names, has amplified the visions of those whose perspectives have contributed so meaningfully to a dynamic and vibrant art world.”

Studio visits often proved fateful, including one where she met her friend and collaborator Mark Bradford and acquired one of his “ginormous” paintings for $2,500. After Bradford described how working at his mother’s Leimert Park beauty shop informed his practice, the LA–based artist turned to Harris Norton and said, per the collector, “Your hair isn’t cute.” The room fell silent, and Harris Norton asked if he could do better. He said he could. “I started going to his shop, and he used to do my hair and did my daughter’s hair, everybody’s hair,” Harris Norton recalled. In 2013, along with Bradford and Allan DiCastro, she launched Art + Practice, a nonprofit that operates exhibition and programming spaces in Leimert Park. Outside of art, the organization focuses on providing services to foster youth and refugees. As a former teacher of English as a second language and Children’s Defense Fund board member, she said, “education has always been at the heart of my philanthropy.” 

This past May, Yale University Press published All These Liberations: Women Artists in the Eileen Harris Norton Collection, with text by curator Taylor Renee Aldridge. Harris Norton is donating copies to historically Black colleges and universities, local universities, libraries, and schools. “It is important for students to have equal access to quality education and to learn about these wonderful women artists of color in contemporary art history,” she said, because she herself had been unaware of them until she started collecting. Though Waddy’s mall demonstration of woodblock printmaking marked the collector’s first experience with contemporary art, it wasn’t until Aldridge commissioned an essay by Steven Nelson for All These Liberations that Harris Norton learned Waddy had been a “godmother” figure to Black artists in LA. “I didn’t know these women artists before I started collecting them,” Harris Norton said. “I’m still learning about them.”  

Jill and Peter Kraus

Through outdoor installation commissions on their Upstate New York property, the couple has created unique opportunities for long-term patronage and artistic growth.

When Jill Kraus and her husband, Peter, started collecting in the early 1980s, the couple had $600 in discretionary income each month and would pay off their early acquisitions in increments. “I don’t know that galleries do that anymore,” Kraus said, “but I hope for young collectors they do.” 

Kraus holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design; she and Peter bought their first piece of art, a $325 print by Pierre Alechinsky, because the artist had exhibited at the 1970 Carnegie International when Jill was a student. John Lefebre, the dealer who sold it, encouraged the couple to return to his gallery, which exhibited mostly artists in the 1940s group CoBrA, a European postwar avant-garde movement inspired by children’s art. Gallery-hopping “became what we did on the weekends,” she said, even with their young children in strollers. 

Kraus, who has been on the board of trustees at MoMA since 2008, has long believed in art’s power to change one’s perspective. While working as the design director at Avon in the 1990s, she brought along her direct reports on field trips around New York City, including to the 1996 Whitney Museum retrospective of LA artist Ed Kienholz, known for his sometimes-macabre assemblages of flea market items that commented on social and political issues. “They all just sat there going, ‘Why are we here?’ And I was like, ‘Because you need to learn to think differently.’ ”

In 2001, the Krauses—who have never hired an art adviser—realized they were collecting mostly works on paper by artists who made sculptures, so they purchased a 400-acre property in Dutchess County, New York, with plans to commission a series of site-specific outdoor installations in hopes of giving those artists the opportunity to “leave their comfort zones and dream,” Kraus said. “In several cases, it has really changed the work of the artist.” For example, Tatiana Trouvé’s ongoing installation Between Sky and Earth—the former woodland camp of a being called The Guardian, who left behind bronze objects like books, shoes, and a lean-to—originated elements of several newer works. “It’s funny, because dealers would say to me, ‘Do you want a Guardian sculpture?’” Kraus said, referring to the chair sculptures for which Trouvé has become known. “And I’m like, ‘We have the original Guardian. The Guardian lives at our house.’” A Doug Aitken video work is projected onto three sides of the house, while Ján Mančuška created an animation inside an outdoor viewing box. 

The commissions have no parameters other than that artists must visit the property at least twice: once when there are leaves on the trees and once when there aren’t. (One artist visited during the warmer months, selected his site on the property, and announced his plan—only to return in the winter and abandon the project. “He freaked out,” Kraus said. “We never heard from him again. He couldn’t fathom doing a piece that could be in antithetical conditions.”)

The projects have also brought friends and collaborators into the Krauses’ lives. Tony Oursler—with whom Kraus now texts daily about politics—took 10 years to complete his installation, while Matthew Monahan’s project lasted 14 years. Jeppe Hein’s family stayed on the property over the summer. “When you’re having a dialogue with artists for that long a … time, you’d better be friends or you’ll want to kill each other,” Kraus said. “You’re spending that much time together.” 

Gilberto Cárdenas

The sociologist has amassed one of the world’s largest collections of Latinx art and is now working closely with institutions to show it. 

“I’m a bottom-up collector,” Gilberto Cárdenas said. The sociologist and professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame grew up in a working-class family and got into documentary photography in the 1960s as a self-described “long-haired hippie” with a desire to document Latino involvement in the Civil Rights movement in California. After receiving a tuition waiver to attend Notre Dame’s graduate school for sociology—“I was the only Mexican American graduate student admitted that year at Notre Dame,” he said—Cárdenas’s interest in photography took him to the fields of Indiana, where he worked with social justice organizations to document the living and working conditions of immigrant farm laborers.

“I got suddenly interested in art,” both contemporary and historical, he said, because from a sociological standpoint, artists offered unique commentary via “the way they depicted the culture and the social relations, whether it be cultural relations or class relations.” Curators and art collectors among the students and faculty at Notre Dame encouraged Cárdenas to start collecting seriously. “I was very fortunate to meet a lot of artists at that time who were really doing a lot but were not getting sufficient attention,” he said. At the time, Latinx art was often siloed from the wider art world. “People didn’t understand it, or they misrepresented Latino culture,” Cárdenas said, with some dismissing Latinx artists as “unimportant, because they weren’t highly valued in the art market.” Cárdenas was an early supporter of the print studio Self-Help Graphics in LA, and after moving to Austin to teach at the University of Texas, he founded the commercial gallery Galería Sin Fronteras, located between campus and the Capitol building, “to represent artists who were not paid much attention by some of the major galleries,” he said. Because artists trusted him, he added, “I could buy a large number of works at a really great price.” 

Over the years, Cárdenas has worked closely with institutions including the Smithsonian and the National Museum of Mexican Art to expand their collections of Latino art and organize exhibitions and publications. In 1994 he became the founding executive director of Latino USA, a weekly radio program produced at UT Austin that was soon picked up by NPR. Last year, after joining the board of trustees of the Blanton Museum, Cárdenas and his wife, Dolores Garcia, donated more than 5,000 works from their collection. After the major gift, the museum hired Claudia Zapata to be its first associate curator of Latino art; Zapata’s initial project involves researching and inventorying the Cárdenas-Garcia donation and producing a catalog of the works.

“With Latinx collectors like Gil and Dolores,” Zapata said, “it’s not a diversification of a financial portfolio where it’s a very removed market experience. It’s very personal, and you can see that in the collecting practice.” 

In the decades since Cárdenas started collecting, he has seen the perception of Latinx art shift in the wider art world thanks to artists, curators, nonprofit leaders, and other collectors. “There is a greater appreciation, greater understanding, and greater location of this art as American art,” he said.

Marieluise Hessel

In establishing a research center and museum at Bard College, the patron believes in art as a vehicle of hope. 

“There was nothing but poverty and loss,” is how Marieluise Hessel remembers Garmisch, the small town in postwar Germany where she grew up. “We lived in one room after the war; we had lost everything,” she said. Her father died, and she was terrified that her mother would soon follow. “The one thing that kind of saved me was this beautiful little church. I would go to the church and pray, and it made me feel so good, and so safe, being in this beautiful environment.” Years later, on a school trip, Hessel visited Schloss Linderhof, one of the castles built in the 1870s by King Ludwig II of Bavaria. “It is there,” she said, “that I learned to dream and fantasize about a better life without war and the misery that is life after it.” 

In the 1960s, Hessel started visiting museums in Vienna (her first husband, Egon Hessel, was Austrian). “I will never forget the day when, for the first time, I saw the works of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele at the Belvedere,” she said. “I did not know it then, but the impact of these beautiful and sad works changed my life.” 

After connecting with the Munich gallerist Heiner Friedrich, Hessel started acquiring works by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, CoBrA artists, and Minimalists. “I collected what I could afford,” she said—one or two paintings per year. “People say, ‘You have an eye,’ and I say, ‘I know nothing, how could I know a Gerhard Richter would [eventually] cost $3 or $5 million?’ I saw it, I liked it, I wanted to have it, I could afford it. That’s the way we went about it. I would never, ever have said, ‘This is a good investment.’ That didn’t exist.” 

With a robust research library inside her New York apartment, Hessel has long followed her curiosities. “The kind of research that Marlies does is as much into the world of thought as into the library of artworks,” Allan Schwartzman, the art adviser, said. “She’s one of a rare handful of collectors who thinks like a curator.” The collection has evolved as society has changed; in the 1990s, Hessel was interested in identity issues and artists documenting AIDS, such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Lately, she has been working closely with artists of the African diaspora, such as Lina Iris Viktor and Zohra Opoku.

“She takes it very seriously,” Schwartzman said. “It’s a job for her. And she wants to do it well. She wants to have the confidence that what she’s sharing with the public is compelling and worthy of sharing.” 

In 1992, after connecting with Bard College president Leon Botstein over their shared interest in turn-of-the-century Vienna, Hessel cofounded the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. In 2006 she founded the Hessel Museum of Art on campus as a place for curatorial students to organize exhibitions using real objects. She also made a world-class collection available to the Upstate public. “I wanted to do something for people who had no access,” she said, because “everybody should have access to dream.”

A version of this article appears in the 2024 ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue.