Magnificent Obsessions’ treats are of a more limited historical span – broadly the past half-century – but the show is a rich testament to varied desires and uses. Others used their collections directly to inform their art, as for example the Japanese prints bought by Degas and Monet. As Yee reminds us, great artists have often wrestled with the urge to collect and the domestic or financial ruin it can bring bankrupted in 1656, Rembrandt was forced to sell his bristling cabinet of exotic shells, corals and animal specimens. The latter’s home on rue Fontaine in Paris, with its thousands of objects, dust-furred over decades, became a monument to the juxtaposing tendency in surrealism, and a wall from the apartment, containing 255 artefacts, can be seen at the Pompidou Centre. In her introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue, curator Lydia Yee points to the teeming collections of African and other native artworks amassed by Pablo Picasso and André Breton. It is in some respects a familiar theme, recalling those artists for whom rampant acquisition and attentive ownership of ancient or novel curios were essential to the making of their own work. The elegant distinction between pathology and taste is one of the subjects explored in Magnificent Obsessions, the Barbican’s new survey of artist-collectors present and (recent) past. They had turned a morbid, chaotic hoarder into a proper collector. Sotheby’s handlers had elegantly corralled an astonishing mess, the product of Warhol’s conspicuous but oddly secretive shopping habit. But the photographs record a canny fiction. The impression is of a keen but democratic aesthete’s eye folk art and mass-produced gewgaws caught Andy’s fancy as much as aspirational antiques. The auctioneers had photographed much of this material at Warhol’s house on East 66th Street his Native American artefacts are lavishly arrayed on the Sheraton dining table, spilling on to 14 Ruhlmann chairs. In the six-volume catalogue that Sotheby’s published for the occasion, these lots seem to fit neatly into a connoisseur’s categories: art nouveau and art deco, drawings and prints, Americana, an entire volume devoted to jewellery and watches. O n 23 April 1988, 14 months after the artist’s unexpected death, the sale of Andy Warhol’s personal effects began in New York.
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