By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

David Rockefeller, MoMA’s honorary chairman, is among 23 collectors profiled in Diane McJanus Jensen’s The Art of Collecting: An Intimate Tour Inside Private Art Collections with Advice on Starting Your Own. The glossy book offers a voyeur’s treat: photos of collectors’ homes and interviews. There are some surprising nuggets.

For instance, Rockefeller is enamored with fiber optic lighting—used to illuminate his Bonnards and Monets—and occasionally makes the gallery rounds with  MoMA director Glenn Lowry.

Other factoids: Lawyer Alan Dershowitz’s house is packed with works by De Chirico, Rockwell Kent and myriad lesser known finds. Janet and Larry Larose own over 350 objects by Christopher Dresser.

The collectors cross a range of categories including the contemporary holdings of Kelly and Scott Miller, Erinch Ozada’s video art and Norman and Alicia Westmoreland Volk’s dog portraiture.

The author, who has worked as a gallery owner and private art advisor, creates an intimate, behind-the-scenes tour. Each Q&A section features installation shots of the collector’s homes, revealing that yes, David Rockefeller lives in a duplex, and that his staircase is adorned with two late waterlily paintings by Claude Monet.

Some of the collections are the result of a methodical approach.  Logan Delany served as chairman of the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers before buying his first piece. He and his wife, Penny, study the market and each piece and then review with an art consultant. Logan attends nearly every American art auction and maintains a database of almost 16,000 images of American art.

Meanwhile, billionaire William I. Koch calls his collection “unusual.” His buys on whim, depending on his mood. His expansive and incongruous collection ranges across Impressionism, Modernish, Western, Marine, and Contemporary art. A Miro hangs near a trio of Remington bronzes. Other possessions include Winslow Homer’s 1873 Three Boys in a Dory,  a Roman head of Dionysus and the rifle that killed Jesse James.

Most of the collectors agree that art should not be purchased based on popularity or investment potential.  Boston sculpture collector David Bakalar buys whatever intrigues him. He advises others to buy art that “adds to your life.” A George Segal bench sculpture depicting Bakalar and his wife ultimately inspired him to try sculpting himself. Bakalar has created his own bronze and granite artworks to accompany Segal’s on the family’s lawn. (See more of Bakalar’s art here.)

Part of the book is divided into fifteen essays offering information about the nuts and bolts of collecting, conservation, art fairs, lighting and insurance. Eli Wilner’s essay addresses the importance of framing. Judith Terra of the Terra Museum of American Art details her family’s process in creating their single-benefactor museum in Chicago. While the pieces provide broad information about the nuances of collecting, they are not detailed enough to provide any real advice or insight. Ultimately, they diverge from the intimacy of the private collector profiles.

Publisher: Jensen Fine Arts $65

Collectors and their Categories:
John Axelrod
African American and South American Art, Art Moderne, and Decorative Arts

Sandra and David Bakalar
Modern and Contemporary Sculpture

Scott M. Black
Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Surrealism

Paulette and Larry Brill
Outsider and Found Art

Penny and Logan Delany
Nineteeth-Century American and Hudson River School Paintings

Carolyn Cohen and Alan Dershowitz
Modern Masters and Judaica

Anne Gallagher
Contemporary Regional Painting

Audrey Heckler
Outsider Art

Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Contemporary Art

William I. Koch
Impressionist, Western, Marine, and Contemporary Art

Janet and Larry Larose
Nineteenth-Century Art and Design and the Art of Charles Dresser

Paula and Peter Lunder
Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century American Art

Catherine and Matt Mandel
African Art and Ceramics

Katherine and Frank Martucci
Nineteenth-Century Paintings by George Inness

Kelly and Scott Miller
Contemporary and Emerging Artists

Tommy Morrison
Photography

Erinch Ozada
Video Art

Anne and William Palmer
Emerging European and American Art

Nancy and Charles Parrish
School of Paris Painting and Southwestern Pottery

David Rockefeller
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

Alicia Westmoreland Volk and Norman Volk
Russian Icons, French and Scottish Impressionism, and Dog Portraits

Jessica Josell Wechsler and Steven Wechsler
Photography and Kinetic Art

Donna and Neil Weisman
Photorealism and Italian Glass

Himalayan art collectors Donald and Shelley Rubin, founders of the Rubin Museum of Art, were motivated sellers.

Their 8,000 square foot townhouse at 122 East 70th Street lingered on the market for a year, tagged $20.9 million. In May the Rubins slashed the price to $14.9 million and snagged a buyer, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

The article quotes brokers predicting fallout from the Rubins’ re-pricing efforts, warning other would-be sellers “expect to see lower offers.” (See property listing here.)

It’s hard to work up much sympathy for sellers of Upper East Side townhouses, or even the Rubins, who acquired the house, with a hot tub and roof garden, in 1995 for a mere $5 million. It seems the Rubins cleared around $10 million on the deal.

Rubin, who founded a health care network, forked over $22 million three years later for the former Barneys building on 17th Street. The Rubin Museum opened in 2004 and has an annual budget of $13 million. The museum is currently searching for a new chief curator, more here.

122 East 70th Street, via Brown Harris Stevens

Halsey Minor made headlines in art circles for his recent litigation with both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, as well as the recent sale of his property at Phillips de Pury, at the behest of the courts. (Some earlier coverage here and here).

Last week Minor penned an essay titled Why I Fight on Huffington Post railing against banks and the FDIC. His battles stem from a hotel he was constructing in Charlottesville. His loans were cut off by Silverton Bank which shortly thereafter was shuttered and taken over by the FDIC.

Minor estimates “between the government and me, roughly $10 million already has been spent in legal fees on a dispute over a $10.3 million loan.”

Read Minor in Huffington Post here.

Link to story here.

A black-and-white Ed Ruscha painting with the words “Let’s Be Realistic” spelled out in bold white letters hangs outside the sound-proof trading room at art collector Adam Sender’s hedge fund.

Sender’s curator, Sarah Aibel, 28, is giving me a tour of the art-stocked office in an old loft building in New York’s SoHo district.

“Trading is what he does for work,” Aibel says of Sender. “And when he’s not trading, art is what he does for love.”

In the trading room, the light is movie-theater low. Sender, who declined to be interviewed, is seated at what resembles a science-fiction command center, surrounded by two dozen glowing monitors.

Out in the hall, a Kara Walker mural runs along a wall. A pink-and-green neon sculpture by minimalist Dan Flavin illuminates a corner. An otherwise generic conference room is hung with a piercing John Currin painting. “The Activists” depicts a frail elderly woman seated before a microphone, holding a sheet with a presumed list of grievances.

“The traders are so focused on finance, the art gives them a break,” Aibel says.

Sender, 41, has collected art since 1998 and currently has about 800 works. Over the years he has bought and sold, including several auctions that yielded prices far in excess of what he originally paid.

Manet Sale

Sender used to work at SAC Capital Advisors LP for Steven A. Cohen, another big art collector. A painting thought to be owned by Cohen, Edouard Manet’s “Self Portrait With a Palette,” sold at Sotheby’s in London last month for 22.4 million pounds ($33.7 million). Cohen paid $18.7 million for the painting at Christie’s International’s 1997 auction of the collection of Wall Street financier John Loeb.

A small portion of the collection hangs in the New York office, where about 25 employees conduct the business of Sender’s firm, Exis Capital Management. A rotating array of artworks hangs in Sender’s apartment in the Tribeca section of Manhattan. Yet more art fills his weekend retreat in the Hamptons section of Long Island. Another chunk is stashed in a warehouse in Long Island City, New York.

Eventually these works, and the rest of Sender’s collection, will be on view to the public thanks to a plan to open an exhibition space. Sender has acquired a property in Long Island’s picturesque Sag Harbor. Aibel declined to go into more detail.

Website Relaunched

In the meantime you can get a taste of Sender’s holdings through his website, http://www.sendercollection.com, which he re-launched late last month. He has doubled the number of works on the site and presents a video by William Kentridge, the South African artist whose retrospective at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art recently ended.

The website reveals Sender’s taste for intellectually challenging work and his penchant for certain artists. He owns about 80 drawings by Raymond Pettibon and 16 sculptures, installations and photographs by Matthew Barney, for instance.
Aibel describes the website as a “lending library” where museum curators can search for works they may wish to borrow for exhibitions. The website lists which works are out on loan. New York’s Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Swiss foundation Beyeler are among current borrowers.

Sender’s own corner office, with unobstructed views of downtown Manhattan, has some of his favorite artworks, including “Absence,” Luc Tuyman’s muted 2001 painting of an empty chair. The office does present more usual hedge-fund fare. Copies of Alan Greenspan’s “Age of Turbulence” and Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” grace an end table. An antique ticker-tape machine stands on a plinth.
Risque in Office

The art in Aibel’s office veers into the risque. A photograph by German artist Thomas Ruff depicts a blurry woman in lingerie towering over a man on a leash crawling beside her. Aibel joined Sender in 2006, working alongside curator Todd Levin, who spearheaded Sender’s collection from 1998 to 2008.

While much of Sender’s collection is notable for conceptual underpinnings, some of it is just pretty. A painting by artist Annie Kevans, a portrait of a sweet-faced young girl, is one of the artists classified on the website as “Up and Coming.” Sender bought it because “he just responded to the fantastic painting,” said Aibel. The work is slated to hang in the bedroom of Sender’s three-year-old daughter.

On a recent visit to Sotheby’s I nabbed a copy of  Sotheby’s At Auction, essentially a glossy advertorial for upcoming auction property with a few articles sprinkled in the mix.

The cover features collector Adam Lindemann, photographed at home in New York, surrounded by contemporary and tribal art. Also prominently displayed is Lindemann’s green and purple faced watch, which I am guessing is probably a Marc Newson designed Ikepod–a brand Lindemann got involved with in 2005.

The cover story focuses on tribal collectors Lindemann as well as South African artist and collector Karel Nel and German collector Peter Henle.

Here’s a story I wrote for the Art Newspaper on French collectors Steve and Chiara Rosenblum and their new contemporary art exhibition space. The venue is slated to open in Paris this fall.

Link to story here.

Link to Bloomberg story here.

Interview by Lindsay Pollock

June 4 (Bloomberg) — Hedge-fund investor James R. Hedges IV mingled with assorted Bronfmans, Gunds, Sacklers and several hundred other art-world notables at a fundraiser this week, munching the canapes at Manhattan’s Four Seasons Restaurant.

The goal was $1 million to help restore a pair of modernist houses owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Yet Hedges, 42, was more than a patron.

Earlier this year, the former president and chief investment officer of LJH Global Investments LLC said goodbye to 18 years in finance to focus on producing, promoting and advising on art. A longtime collector and museum patron, involved with London’s Tate Modern, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and other institutions, he is now putting his insider’s experience to work.

“I’m pragmatic about viewing art as a financial asset,’’ Hedges said in an interview this week. “I see it as an inefficient market that is misunderstood, that has got little in the way of transparency and limitations in the way business is conducted. But with all that being said, people can make a tremendous amount of money investing in this field.’’

Hedges cites similarities between the art world and the early days of hedge funds: Both are “cottage industries, relationship-based and with zero transparency. They really require special guidance.’’
Besides working with collectors in a traditional art- adviser role, Hedges aims to help artists, dealers and institutions find new ways to raise funds.

Video Project

In connection with the fundraiser, Hedges is producing a video by artist Sarah Morris, a visual portrait featuring Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, both under the management of the National Trust. Revenue from sales of the limited-edition video will support the houses through an initiative called “Modern Views.’’ One hundred artists and architects have donated artworks inspired by the Glass House and Farnsworth House, and proceeds of sales will support preservation at both sites. Morris’s video will be screened in Chicago and New York in the fall.

“There are not a lot of people looking to create value for artists,’’ said Hedges. “There are art advisers who will create value for collectors. I’m interested in being a catalyst, and doing it in a way that benefits the artist.’

“It’s not enough for him to buy a painting and hang it on the wall,’’ said dealer Friedrich Petzel, who represents Sarah Morris. “He is more interested in the process.’’

Kalup Linzy

Hedges has also teamed up with Lisa Cortes, the executive producer of the movie “Precious,’’ to develop a feature film and other artistic projects with performance and video artist Kalup Linzy, who is best known for his satirical videos, often featuring himself in drag.

Hedges, who grew up in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, credits his grandmother with helping to spark his interest in the arts. When he was a boy, she took him around the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga. His father is a wood sculptor and painter.

Hedges’s art collecting began with photography. He gravitated toward images by the masters including Alfred Stieglitz, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

He moved on to the moderns, buying Matisse and Picasso drawings and a Calder mobile. He said he was buying in “a blue- chippy way.’’ He progressed to conceptual and minimalist artists such as Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Brice Marden and Ellsworth Kelly. This phase coincided with a spot on the board of the Dia Art Foundation, which focuses on similar artists.

Titanium Cloud

Hedges got a taste of art production when he was hunting for a sculpture for his loft in Manhattan’s Tribeca district. He was enamored with a titanium cloud by sculptor Inigo Manglano- Ovalle (a large version hangs in Bloomberg’s New York headquarters) and approached the artist’s dealer about producing a smaller version.

Hedges funded the project — the production cost per cloud was $25,000 — got his sculpture and helped the dealer sell an additional five. The pieces are now valued at more than $250,000, according to Hedges.

“There are great commercial ideas that have existing audiences, and will garner financial support,’’ Hedges said. “You just have to go out and grab them.’’

Click here to watch video.

Peter Brant has given Swiss artist Urs Fischer the run of his bucolic Greenwich, Connecticut-based Brant Foundation Art Study Center, resulting in an irreverent, cunning portrait of the collector. Using wallpaper and wax, Fischer raises poignant questions about mortality, reproduction and the very nature of art accumulation.

Brant’s reputation as a longtime collector is well known, but there was still something startling about standing in a two dimensional likeness of his home, filled with so many expensive artworks, reduced to flat copies.  The wallpaper piece, which reproduces Brant’s Warhols and Lichtensteins, alongside shelves arrayed with art books, family photos and silver polo trophies, is pointedly titled “Abstract Slavery.”

To further the point, Brant’s waxy likeness, a life-size human candle, melts amid the material trophies.

Though I couldn’t get an credible explanation from Fischer’s dealer Gavin Brown or Brant or anyone else about the show’s ironic Oscar the Grouch title, the squat green Muppet is best known for his compulsive hoarding of trash.

This is a show well worth seeing. It’s open by appointment through Spring 2011. (To schedule an appointment, email thebrantfoundation@gmail.com)

Last weekend I visited the foundation, camera in tow. Brant sat down with me and shared his thoughts on the exhibition.

Click here to watch video.

Oscar the Grouch from Lindsay Pollock on Vimeo.

Fashion designer Valentino is something of a fixture at the contemporary art auctions, usually perched in the front row, bidding–but not overspending–on choice items.

At Sotheby’s May 11 contemporary art sale he went for a large riotous Cecily Brown canvas, but relented as the price soared. The painting sold for $1.1 million (est. $500,000-$700,000) to a phone bidder.

Critic Phyllis Tuchman snapped this photo of him outside Christie’s on Sunday during the auction previews and kindly shared it with Art Market Views.

Link to Bloomberg News story here.

By Lindsay Pollock

May 12 (Bloomberg) — Marguerite Hoffman, a prominent Dallas art collector, filed suit this week against Mexican financier David Martinez for failing to keep her 2007 sale of a star Mark Rothko painting a secret. The suit stems from the painting’s public sale tonight at Sotheby’s, estimated to fetch as much as $25 million.

Three years ago, after her 59-year-old husband’s death, Hoffman sold the painting to an undisclosed buyer, with the proviso that the details of the sale remain a secret, according to her lawsuit, filed in a Dallas, Texas, district court.

Hoffman sold the Rothko in April 2007, just as the painting came off the walls at the Dallas Museum of Art where it had hung in an exhibition titled “Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art,” featuring promised gifts to the museum. Hoffman is a trustee at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Marguerite and her late husband Robert Hoffman were among three Dallas couples who in 2005 announced a pledge to donate their art collections to the Dallas Museum of Art upon their deaths. The terms of the gift permit the patrons to buy and sell works of art during their lifetimes, according to Roger Netzer, Hoffman’s lawyer with Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, which is also general outside counsel for Bloomberg LP.

“The reason she wanted to keep it a secret was because it was a time of grief, and she didn’t want the public scrutiny,” said Netzer.

In pursuit of privacy, Hoffman chose to sell the painting through dealers, rather than at auction, “sacrificing the substantial premium” she could have reaped from a high-profile auction, according to the suit.

‘Millions Less’

The painting “would have sold at public auction for $30 million to $40 million” in April 2007, according to Sotheby’s Tobias Meyer, quoted in court papers. Hoffman sold the painting “for millions of dollars less,” according to the suit.

In May 2007, David Rockefeller’s Rothko sold at Sotheby’s in New York for a record $72.8 million. Now Hoffman’s former painting, a luminous 1961 Rothko “Untitled” with two red rectangles, is to be sold tonight as one of the marquee lots at Sotheby’s.

Sotheby’s and Meyer, its worldwide head of contemporary art, are named as defendants in the suit.

“The lawsuit neither challenges our consignor’s title to the painting, nor its right to sell the painting, and the sale will go forward as planned,” said Sotheby’s spokeswoman Diana Phillips. “The lawsuit is entirely without merit.”

Contractual Promise

Hoffman’s suit accuses Martinez of breaking his contractual promise to “make ‘maximum effort’ to keep confidential ‘all aspects’ of the transaction through which he acquired it,” according to Hoffman’s suit. This agreement meant that Martinez “could not turn around, sell the painting at public auction, then pocket the premium that plaintiff had forgone,” according to the suit.

Martinez declined to comment. The suit also names Studio Capital Inc., a Belize company controlled by Martinez “for the purposes of maintaining the secrecy of his purchases and sales of art,” according to the suit. Martinez is founder of Fintech Advisory.

The 2007 agreement was made with dealers representing the buyer and seller. L & M Arts, owned by former Goldman Sachs partner Robert Mnuchin, represented the buyer. Greenberg Van Doren represented Hoffman, according to Netzer. L & M Arts is also named as a defendant.

Hoffman alleges that L & M owner Robert Mnuchin “expressly promised that the painting would ‘disappear’ into his undisclosed buyer’s ‘very private’ collection.”

“Every action the gallery has taken in its dealings with Rothko ‘Untitled’ of 1961 is consistent with the highest ethical standards for which the gallery stands,” Robert Mnuchin said in a telephone interview.

Mnuchin’s gallery acquired the painting for $1.87 million in 1997 at Christie’s International and then later sold the painting to the Hoffmans.

Hoffman’s late husband Robert was a co-founder of National Lampoon magazine and an owner of one of the biggest Coca-Cola bottlers in the country.

“She is suing to vindicate her honor and to set a standard for what is not to be tolerated in the art world,” said Netzer.

To contact the reporter on the story: Lindsay Pollock in New York at lindsaypollock@yahoo.com;