WesReads X WHALE: The Joys of Collecting by J. Paul Getty
On being unspeakably rich, disgustingly stingy, and yet a true lover of the arts.
📖 An occasional series diving into a book-length text pertaining to art history, the art world, NFTs, blockchain and WHALE Member’s mission to become the MoMA of the Metaverse.
J. Paul Getty (1892–1976) was an American businessman, oil tycoon, writer, & art collector whose vast wealth and love of art allowed him to acquire a formidable collection of ancient sculpture, renaissance painting, and antique furniture & tapestry over several decades. His desire to share these treasures with the world eventually led him to establish & endow the J. Paul Getty Museum, which is now a 2-campus institution in Los Angeles with a highly regarded collection drawing millions of visitors a year.
J. Paul Getty was also a notorious cheapskate who famously refused to pay the ransom demand for his kidnapped 16 year old grandson at a time when he was the richest man in America. Only after the boy’s severed ear was received by the press did he agree to negotiate, and even then he only agreed to personally pay an amount equivalent to the maximum that he would be allowed to deduct on his taxes(!?). To cover the remainder of the ransom he loaned the balance to his son, to be paid back (with interest). When his grandson was finally released months after being abducted he called Getty to thank him and Getty refused to take the call. So yeah Getty was cheap as all hell (and kind of a bastard) and that definitely affected how he collected his art.
J. Paul Getty was also a notorious cheapskate who famously refused to pay the ransom demand for his kidnapped 16 year old grandson at a time when he was the richest man in America.
So yeah, the dude was complex.
Here are some lessons I learned from his short work The Joys of Collecting.
1. Know what you’d like to collect
The choice a collector makes is necessarily guided and governed by many and various factors and influences. The most important consideration is, of course, the simplest one of all: in what direction or directions do his interests in and liking for fine art lie?
What is the ultimate in artistic beauty to one person, may well be a bore or an abomination to another. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever watched any sizeable group of people making its way through a large museum. The Joys of Collecting (13)
It’s hard to start a journey unless you have at least an inkling of where you’d like to end up. Similarly, if you say “I’d like to start collecting art!” you should at least have a notion of they type of things you’d like to collect. This can be as broad as “generative art” or “outdoor photography” or as specific as “ Series 3 Rare Pepes” but you should start with at least a category or two, based on your interests, to begin pursuing.
Getty helpfully provides examples of his specific collecting categories which were:
- Greek & Roman marbles & bronzes
- Renaissance Paintings
- 16th century Persian Carpets
- Savonnerie carpets
- 18th century French furniture & tapestries
NOW, I would suspect that your interests are probably going to vary greatly from those of 73 year old billionaire in 1965, but the basic principle is sound:
🔑 Have a general idea of what you want to collect and, broadly, try to stick to it.
This will 1. help you cut through the noise of the endless variety of new work across multiple platforms and 2. lead you build up a sense of the best artists, the latest developments, fair pricing, and your preferred platforms within a given sector over time.
For me personally I’ve discovered that I’m mainly interested in text-based art, long form generative art, pixel art, afro-futurism, & glitch art and it’s been a joy to build up my knowledge about the history and markets for those areas. It doesn’t mean I ignore everything else, but having those categories as an anchor helps to keep me focused and well-positioned to find and acquire what I like.
2. Don’t just buy it. Care about it.
“In order to be a successful collector of any type or school of fine art, an individual must learn as much as he can about it before he starts collecting. He must be able to recognize what he is looking for, and be able to recognize at least the more patent counterfeits.” (32)
OK for this one I’d just like to confirm that the title of this book is The Joys of Collecting and NOT The Joys of Investing or The Economic Potential of Flipping JPEGs OK? Public blockchains are free and open markets and anyone reading this is welcome to do whatever they like with their funds. If your goal in NFTs is to make bank and that alone, very well. Have at it.
But if you’re collecting because you truly love the pieces you acquire, because you revel in the ways they make you feel or the questions they make you ask, or because you see collecting itself as a creative/expressive act and you are trying to communicate something through your collection and your display of it then Getty’s story of his relationship with the Rembrandt portrait of Marten Looten is particularly instructive.
Taking up an entire chapter of the book (Ch. IV A Rembrandt Masterpiece) Getty details how he first encountered the portrait in-person at Rotterdam’s Boyman Museum in 1928, among 40 or so other works by the master. The painting had been bought by a private British collector for 800 pounds in 1849 and had remained in his family until 1928 when a wealthy Dutch businessman purchased it for $204,000 (approx $3.5M in 2022). Although it was moving from one private collection to another a driving motivation of the purchaser was that this work of a Dutch master, depicting a prominent Dutch citizen, would be brought back to its home country.
Getty was forcefully drawn to the painting in 1928 and visited it many times while it was on display but had no thoughts of purchasing it at the time. Flash forward to 1938 and the collection of the Dutch businessman was being broken up. In the intervening decade the Great Depression had sunk the art market and forced many wealthy people who’d been diamond-handed up until then to sell all kinds of assets at discount prices. Additionally WWII was on the horizon and Europeans were flocking into cash to prepare for the coming storm. Getty saw his opportunity and authorized his art agent in the Netherlands to bid up to $100K on the piece. However he recognized that the people of Holland had an intense national pride in the work of Rembrandt and that there would be fairly severe backlash if they learned that one of his most notable pieces had been sold out of the country again, just 10 years after being brought home. As such Getty advised the agent to make the buy anonymously (the IRL equivalent of using a burner wallet to mint).
Getty was able to score the portrait, anonymously, for just $65k (a painful and familiar reminder of just how hard art prices can crash when the economy is bad and the geopolitical landscape is scary and FUD reigns supreme). Predictably there was indeed a national outrage with articles in Dutch newspapers berating the national government for not stepping in to purchase the portrait and instead letting it fall into the hands of an “Unnamed American.”
OK for this one I’d just like to confirm that the title of this book is The Joys of Collecting and NOT The Joys of Investing or The Economic Potential of Flipping JPEGs OK?
So to recap: Getty saw a painting and fell in love with it but was in no position to acquire it. But he didn’t let not being able to own it get in the way of his appreciation and he visited it multiple times out of sheer appreciation for the beauty he saw in it. 10 years later he has the opportunity to buy it at fire sale prices and does so, but anonymously. He could’ve left it at that, but instead we saw an instance where his art lover side prevailed over his investor side.
Soon after the painting arrived in America he arranged to loan it out for display (again, anonymously) to the New York World’s Fair so that millions of Americans would have the opportunity to enjoy it and learn about the art of Rembrandt.
After another decade passed Getty found himself in Amsterdam once again, this time on a mission to conduct firsthand research about the life of the actual Marten Looten, the subject of the portrait. His passion and curiosity for the work had never waned, despite owning it all that time and he hoped to not only enhance his understanding of how the painting came to be commissioned but also perhaps to solve the long standing mystery of what was written in the body of the letter that Looten is holding in the piece.
Getty visited archives, spoke to specialists, and ultimately consulted privately with one of the most prominent Rembrandt scholars in the country, who had happened to be one of the most vocal critics when the painting had been sold to the “Unnamed American” years before. He did this without revealing his ownership of the piece at first as he knew that the Dutch art establishment was still sore about it having left the country. The mystery of the letter’s message was never solved (most now believe it was intentionally rendered as filler gibberish to add detail to the work) but Getty did manage to ultimately gain the approval of the Dutch art world as a true lover and promoter of Rembrandt’s work through his obvious knowledge of and care for Rembrandt’s work.
🔑 So do your research, learn about the community of appreciators who are already into the work you’re eyeing and: just because you love a work doesn’t mean you have to buy it right now...or at all.
Getty had always been a successful businessman, he likely could have scraped together the funds to purchase the painting in 1928 if he’d known about the sale, but as he mentions in the book he was focused on re-investing all of his profits back into his business at the time. Instead he simply resolved to visit the work as often as he could, and to learn more about the life and work of Rembrandt, which only served to enhance his appreciation for the portrait. He didn’t own it, but he loved it and was inspired by it. And as fate would have it a decade of waiting brought conditions that allowed him to buy the work for less than half the price he’d have shelled out before. This lesson is even easier to hold onto in the world of NFTs where you don’t have to physically travel to view and appreciate art that you don’t own. Any NFT is freely available to view and enjoy by anyone with an Internet connection so make sure you’re in a good position to buy a work before doing so. If you want to support an artist telling others about their work is never a bad first step.
3. NFTs have really helped with that pesky problem of provenance.
“Much caution is needed in buying paintings, whether those of old masters or living moderns. There are many, all too many, wrongly attributed or totally spurious paintings about, as well as large numbers that have been stolen from their rightful owners.” (55)
OK, obviously Getty didn’t drop this specific knowledge bomb on us since he died 3 decades before Bitcoin but the point is indirectly reinforced just the same via his retelling of what he considered to be one of his most savvy investments…and its eventual unraveling.
Getty talks about being at an art auction in London in 1938 and eyeing up some “after-Raphael” pieces. That is to say extremely high-quality copies of works by Raphael executed by artists who were usually direct pupils of the master. As always, he wanted to be as informed as possible about potential acquisitions so he consulted an English portraitist and expert who advised him to go after the piece The Madonna di Loreto since he suspected based on a few details that the work was actually the original by Raphael himself (which had been lost for a time) and not just a well-done copy.
Getty acted on the advice and when the time came to bid he only had to up his initial offer one time as almost no one else had any interest in what was thought to be just another in a long line of copies of the lost work. He walked away with it for 40 pounds (or $200 at the time).
Getty liked the piece and since it was so relatively cheap he was happy to just cop it. 25 years went by where the work sat uncleaned and un-hung in storage until he eventually had it put up in his English manor house in 1963. When a friend and prominent British art dealer came through to visit Getty had him take a look at the work and related how he’d been advised it might be an original. The dealer scoffed and dismissed that notion as utter fantasy, but recommended he at least get the painting cleaned, which it badly needed. When that had been done the dealer changed his tune altogether. The enhanced clarity provided by the cleaning led him to believe it just might have been the long lost original. So they called in a Raphael expert with a PhD and loads of experience and had the painting totally stripped to remove all of the re-paint and varnish it had acquired over the centuries and the expert (and several more after him) gave his opinion that it was indeed an original.
It is hard to overstate how much of an ABSOLUTE LIFETIME SCORE this was. I mean think about it, you buy an old banged up copy that no one really cares about for what was the equivalent of about $4.2K and it turns out to be…a 1/1 by the guy who the coolest Ninja Turtle is named after. Nice. Getty promptly had the work insured for 10,000x the price he paid for it and patted himself on the back for the rest of his life for the scoop of the century.
Except…it turned out to only be a copy after all. After being initially authenticated by several experts, people who had spent their entire professional lives studying the work of the era and the specific oeuvre of Raphael, it was ultimately determined that Getty’s Madonna di Loreto was exactly what it was initially sold to him as, a well-rendered facsimile. This re-evaluation was rapid. In 1964 Time Magazine was praising Getty for his keen eye and good luck, and by 1976 (the year of Getty’s death) the journal of his own museum was saying “Eh…maybe we should pump the brakes on celebrating”.
In the end, this was all mostly just a slight embarrassment and a some wasted insurance premium payments. Getty had spent was more or less pocket change to him on a piece that he actually liked and which, though not a Raphael original, definitely still has artistic and historical value. But you can’t read this story and not think about the fact that the jankiest [adjective] [animal] PFP rug-pull NFT bouncing around in the bowels of OpenSea easily offers what Getty and an army of art scholars and detailed infrared/x-ray analysis could not: immutable provenance for that specific token. ⛓
These are just a few of the lessons to be gleaned from this book, which is again a short and breezy read. I’d recommend it to anyone beginning their art collecting journey whether their focus is physical art or digital art or both.
📃 Here are some additional choice quotes that I believe are as relevant as ever:
“Although (a collector) may prefer one or a few types or schools of art to all others, his acquaintance with and understanding of one or certain specific forms of beauty cannot help but extend and expand his aesthetic horizons. He cannot avoid, sooner or later, recognizing and appreciating other forms, other schools, other categories of fine art. As his specialized collection grows, so his tolerance, his understanding and appreciation will grow. And so will his depth and dimension as a perceptive, sensitive and well rounded individual.” (20)
“The individual who wishes to start a collection should never overlook the potential of young “beginning” artists. If the collector has a basic understanding and feeling for paintings and has developed his tastes to any appreciable degree, the possibility of finding an artist who will eventually reach top rank is always present.” (56)
“Before you invest, investigate.” (73)
OK, that’s it for this book overview, but certainly not the only art-related media that we’re discussing in WHALE Members!
Be sure to stop by our Discord and check out the 👉 #art-edu 👈 channel for additional Book recommendations & dope conversation!
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