4th January 1998

Couple's $2m art treasures go for $206m

Perhaps the world's greatest private collec tion of modern art, acquired for less than $2 million (£1.2 million) by a New York couple who strolled the galleries on Saturday afternoons, has sold at auction for a record $206 million.

Victor and Sally Ganz began their now legendary 115-piece collection with the purchase of Picasso's Le Reve (The Dream) in 1941 for $7,000. In the sale of their estate at Christie's on Monday, the Picasso portrait of his sleeping teenage mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, fetched $48.4 million.

An intensely private couple, the Ganzes hung their collection in simple frames on the walls of their town house in Gracie Square, sometimes obscuring them with lamps or flower vases. Ganz, who died in 1987, ran his family's costume jewellery business. His wife, who died in January, devoted herself to charitable causes.

Though not particularly rich by the standards of today's tycoons, they amassed one of the finest private collections of modern art by focusing their buying on high quality work by a few bluechip artists. The couple became the largest private owners of Picassos in America and acquired important works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Eva Hesse, the German-born minimalist sculptor.

Tony Ganz, their son, said his father "had taught himself to find the toughest picture often a picture that he did not understand initially and was not yet in love with. And, pretty much without fail, those were the pictures that turned out to be the great ones."

Drawn by that reputation for connoisseurship, an estimated 25,000 people visited Christie's in the two weeks before the sale to view the collection.

On Monday, the auction house's four sale rooms were crammed with 2,000 people, more than twice the normal attendance.

Sixty telephones double the usual number, were set up to accept bids and every private office was rigged with closed-circuit television for buyers seeking to watch in privacy.

Many of the world's best-known collectors and dealers were in the crowd.

With the art market surging along with the soaring stock market, the sale easily exceeded its estimate of $125 million, with the Picassos alone accounting for $164 million.

The previous record for the collection of a single private owner was the $123.4 million fetched in 1989 by Impressionist and modern art belonging to John Dorrance, the Campbell's Soup heir.

Ganz's purchase of Le Reve came at a turning point in his life.

Within six months of buying the canvas, he married and began psychoanalysis. When in Monte Carlo in 1948, the couple set out to meet the artist. They drove to nearby Golfe-Juan and befriended a local bookseller whose shop Picasso patronised.

They lay in wait at a cafe until they saw Picasso enter, then followed him in and told him how they had bought Le Reve. The $48.4 million paid at Christie's by an anonymous buyer for the painting was the second-highest auction price for a Picasso, lagging only behind the $51.6 million paid at the height of the art boom in 1989 for Pierrette's Wedding. It was the fifth highest sum paid for. a painting at auction.

The Ganzes took the biggest financial risk of their collecting career when they paid $212,500 for the 15 works in Picasso's series Women of Algiers, painted in 1954 and 1955 and a sneaking homage to Matisse who had died weeks earlier.

Ganz realised that he might have spent too much, and sold all but five works to dealers and museums for $138,000. Four of the five remaining canvases were sold at Christie's: the most important, Version O, to Libby Howe, the London dealer for $.31.9 million.

The only artist Ganz could claim to have discovered was the sculptor Eva Hesse, who died of brain cancer in 1970 at the age of 34.

The Ganzes were making their customary round of galleries in November 1968 when Mrs Ganz got tired feet and returned home. Her husband then viewed Hesse's first exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery and was entranced by her strange constructions of sheet metal, staples and rubber tubing, making his first purchases of her works. Hesse's Unfinished, Untitled or Not Yet, a 1966 sculpture of polyethylene, sand, paper and cotton, fetched a record price at Christie's of $2.2 million. Vinculum I (1969) became the artist's second most expensive work when it sold for $1.2 million.

The only painting that did not sell was Rauschenberg's Rigger (1961) which failed to reach its estimate with a top bid of $2.4 million.

"It was a remarkable evening," Christopher Burge, Christie's chairman, said. "What a tribute it was to Victor and Sally Ganz, to their extraordinary taste and extraordinary judgment."

-The Times

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