Daniel Lee – Year of the Donkey - cibiachrome, digitally-altered photograph, Ed. 8/12, 30x24”, 1993 “Patric Lehmann Collection”

In the Arts
The Catalytic Collector
by Julie Oakes

The collector is as necessary to the creation of art as the artist. It is a difference, merely, of who is crossing the road first. The relationship between the artist and the collector can be as intimate as lovers, or as distant, yet pertinent, as sponsoring a foreign child through a charitable organization. In order to create art, the artist needs to be nourished not only with food and shelter but also with feedback and acceptance. The artist, like any other human, is a social being (even when anti-social in the artwork) and needs to be embraced by society. This is the gift that the collector bestows upon the artist in a fundamental way; for the collector gives the artist an appreciated place in the workings of society.

The art scene today is very complicated. It is a tangle of co-dependencies. The museums, commercial galleries, art writers, networking institutions, granting agencies and art journals all have parts in, and affect, the symbiotic relationship between the collector and the artist. Sometimes they strengthen that relationship, but they also can get in the way of a purer and more honest simpatico between the principle players. In the film “Pollock” there is a scene where the collector, Peggy Guggenheim, climbs four flights of stairs (a Greenwich Village ‘walk-up’) to visit the artist’s studio. She complains about it, but - because she is in the physical presence of the art and it touches her - it is the beginning of a direct patronage. That scene can still exist, but it is not so likely, for there is quite often a chaperone that inhibits the natural flow between the artist and the collector - an intruder, a monitor, a spy during the love affair that begins through the seduction of a phenomenal object. The reason for the third person in the party might be as simple as the numbers that reflect the growth in population since the forties when Peggy climbed those stairs; now there are more people, more artists, more artworks to be shown and housed, more publishers and more piggy-backers riding on the backs of the artists. Yet within this house of cards, there is still the potential for that marriage between the collector and the artist, where the artist nourishes and cultivates an atmosphere conducive to creation while the collector deals with business and provides the livelihood.

As Christmas opens our lives to the acquisition of more things, it is an opportunity to extend the idea of possessions into the magic realm of creating a collection. The choice of the ‘collected’ is as individualistic as deciding on a career or a spouse and involves many of the same considerations. There is the objective collector, the one who accesses the acquisition with an eye to the future and how it will shape and further his destiny. And there is the subjective, romantic collector who ‘falls in love’ with his latest flame or remains loyal as if to a betrothed.

The collectors deserve to be applauded. They have kept the arts alive through direct patronage, while often also contributing to the necessary existence of the off-shoots of the art business. As collectors, they are as unique as the artists. Their visions have contributed to the existence and support of the avant-garde.
 
Introducing the collectors…

Patric Lehmann
Of Lehmann and Leskiw Fine Arts, Patric Lehman’s collection reflects his waking moments. He is within the tradition of dealers who have amassed great collections because they have been involved in the nuts and bolts of the art business, a quotidian symbiosis that is the result of that lucky phrase, “being in the right place at the right time.”

Patric was in New York, LA and Berlin where greatness was his neighbor, lover, and roommate. He knew Robert Mapplethorpe and Tom of Finland and owns pieces by them both. He has a David Hockney painting of a slim young man naked on his belly on the famous ochre diving board beside the equally famous turquoise blue pool. He also has large and important works by Atilla Richard Lucaks, one of the groups of painters known as the Canadian New Romantics. The National Gallery of Canada has devoted an entire suite of galleries to the work of Atilla Richard Lucaks.

Patric Lehmann is saturated in art collecting. He ‘gets it’ from all sides. He acquires, deals, exhibits and in fact influences the very course of the history of art actively, through the validation of his patronage, his witty insight and ardent enthusiasm. He has acquired the status of a trendsetter, a mini Gagosian, a scathing valedictorian of contemporary art.

Ydessa Hendeles
Ydessa Hendeles, the founder of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, was the child of parents who survived the holocaust. From this sad soil of human abuse, her family grew to become examples of perseverance and achievement. She began collecting as a gallerist, getting in on the early careers of such art world luminaries as Louise Bourgeois and Cindy Sherman as well as the Canadians Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, Jana Sterbak, Kim Adams, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Liz Magor. She used the inheritance from her father to open the rare anomaly of a private gallery that is open to the public, and in doing so, personally granted her taste and knowledge to those curious enough to arrive at the doors of 778 King Street West between 12 and 5 on Saturdays.

She is a rare combination of public exposure and privacy. She has been a member of the International Councils of both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Tate Gallery. According to Matthew Teitelbaum, director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, “Ydessa Hendeles has been the most important catalytic individual advocating for contemporary art in this country. What she does through the Foundation is unparalleled and without precedent in Canada.” Yet with the Foundation having a policy of not advertising and with no catalogues or pontificating wall texts, her approach is much like an educational institution. With exhibitions that she curates from her collection, usually with a humanistic underpinning, Ydessa Hendeles walks a line between avatar and woman, a kind of Joan of Arc of collectors.

William Jamieson
How does one keep the old fresh and the young interested in the old? William Jamieson has found the answer by collecting truly curious items and then sharing his bold interests with an encompassing welcome. His home, which houses much of his collection, consists of three floors of artifacts, taxidermy, historical and cultural curiosities. His collection competes on a level of mythological proportions with major museums and royal houses. The new television series, Heads and Tails, will be filmed in this charged venue.

William Jamieson hosted a Halloween party. Everyone was there, although many were unrecognizable in bizarre and gorgeous costumes. There were two Egyptian mummies, still in cases, at the second floor landing, approached by a sweeping art deco stairway. It appeared that Lawrence of Arabia, the Queen of Sheba and a magenta-haired dominatrix were reverently examining the mummies while two women from the court of Louis XIV were whispering to each other, in awe of the concentrated conversation between the kneeling archaeologist and Egyptologist. On the next floor down, there was a sculpture as if viewed through an open fridge door. It was of a naked man frozen in a block of ice (resin) and crying to be released, by Mark Printer who made the piece in the seventies. It exhibited at The Power Plant.

Amongst the company were rich patrons of the arts and artists. There were beautiful actresses, aura readers, museologists, an Eastern European symphony conductor, financial barons, literary glitterati and even a few men in suits. All were collected together in the presence of a phenomenal collection that included tribal shields, human skulls, anteaters, contemporary art work, shrunken Amazonian Shuar heads, vintage magic posters (Houdini) and myriad objects beyond compare. Amazement spun connections between personalities as spectacular and diverse as the collection itself. The power of phenomenal objects hung upon the host, the collector William Jamieson, like a royal mantle. And with sovereign aplomb, he had generously shared the experience of his collection so that the company was transformed from ordinary citizens into a more enlightened cast of humanity.
 
Great collections touch those who are lucky enough to experience them in a way that mere possessions are unable to, for artwork creates a meaningful exchange between the object and the viewer. Collectors raise the bar. The art gets better. Viewers are rewarded with a more illuminated cultural perspective and the acquisition of ‘things’ rises above mere materialism to join the finer realms: the princely domains where treasures shine with a stunning magnificence and brighten whoever comes into their beam. ~