A wall for every work: interview with Barney Ebsworth: Barney Ebsworth's proposed bequest to the Seattle Art Museum of 65 great American Modernist paintings is the culmination of a collecting career driven by a businessman's shrewd analysis of undervalued works as well as a deep emotional attachment to art.

Barney Ebsworth recalls the exact moment when he purchased Edward Hopper's Chop Suey for $180,000. 'It was 14 December 1974 at 10.35 am Central Standard Time. I remember precisely because although I knew how great the picture was, and that the price was fair, I just didn't think I should spend that much money on a picture.' Now the Hopper, painted in 1929 (Fig. 4), is one of the most famous American paintings in the world: an iconic evocation of the ennui of American metropolitan life. '10 years ago I was offered $60m for the painting. Today the market has gone crazy, and there are no great Hoppers left. So who knows what it's worth--and I'm not selling anyway.'

Instead Ebsworth has willed Chop Suey, together with 64 other works from his collection of American Modernist paintings, to the Seattle Art Museum. The gift was made in association with 52 other local collectors to mark the museum's 75th anniversary this year. Their combined bequest of over 1,000 works is worth in excess of $1bn, one of the largest in the history of institutional donations, but then also one of the most recent. Just as the scarcity of work on the market makes such collections almost impossible to amass today, so too has the value of the individual works, like Chop Suey, increased exponentially in recent years.

'When I hear of individual works of art selling for over $100m, I say, "What took so long?'", says Ebsworth. He explains, 'I was in international business in the 1980s, when so much wealth was being created and I could see that, with free trade, the whole world was going to open up. Although art has been created for over 3,000 years, it's only really been bought in the last century. So dramatic changes in the supply-demand curve were and are taking place: I think in less than 100 years all the important works of art will be in museums.'

Ebsworth is 73 years old. Born and raised in St Louis, Missouri, where he spent his working life, he moved to Seattle in 2002, following his retirement and a divorce. His house (Fig. 2) is set on 300 feet of waterfront in the upscale Hunts Point area outside Seattle, where his neighbours include Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the Nordstrom family of the eponymous department store. Ebsworth's 14,000-square-foot home was designed in association with the architect Jim Olson, and is, he considers, the culmination of a life spent looking at art and architecture--even the floor plan is loosely based on that of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark.

The house was designed around Ebsworth's two major collections of paintings--the pre-war American Modernists that he bought until, 'I could no longer find paintings from the period that were good enough', and the post-war work that he purchased subsequently, by such artists as Pollock, Gorky, Rauschenberg, De Kooning, Johns, Warhol and Hockney.

Ebsworth asked Olson to ensure that each major work of art should have a wall of its own--and there are a lot of walls. It is a rare pleasure to be in such intimate proximity to museum-quality pictures. Work by Ellsworth Kelly hangs in the bathroom; there are two Georgia O'Keeffe paintings in the hallway (Fig. 5); Jackson Pollock (Fig. 3), Edward Hopper and Arshile Gorky fill the den; while a gigantic early painting by Hockney, Henry Geldzabler and Christopher Scott (1968-69), which was exhibited as part of the 2006-07 retrospective of Hockney's portraits in London, Boston and Los Angeles, dominates the sitting room (Fig. 1). Geldzahler, a Metropolitan Museum of Art curator and influential critic, sits on a sofa that squares Ebsworth's arrangement of furniture in the room, presiding over conversation like an idealised imaginary psychiatrist, seeming to nod and give his benediction. 'I bought this picture about 10 years ago', Ebsworth says, 'now the Museum of Modern Art in New York wants it--they were silly not to buy it at the time.'

Ebsworth amassed his collection with the intention of leaving it to a public institution on his death. Five paintings, including a major Georgia O'Keeffe abstract, Black White and Blue (1930), have been willed to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where Ebsworth was a trustee and where his collection was exhibited in 2000. He considered leaving the bulk of his collection of paintings to the National Gallery. 'Then I realised that they don't have any room for them. These great museums have great pictures in the basement because they don't have any space on the walls.' Some works are promised to the Honolulu Academy of Art--Ebsworth has been wintering in Hawaii for 28 years--and the St Louis Art Museum.

Ebsworth says that he has yet to decide the ultimate recipient of the rest of his collection, yet is clearly making plans for posterity. He is in the process of building near his home an Anglican chapel designed by Tadao Ando. 'If this isn't one of the greatest chapels in America then I'm going to be disappointed', he says of the project, which he and Ando have been planning for years. 'I've seen so many great things, I'm hoping to do a great thing and I'm hoping to leave a great thing.'

Ebsworth came from a white-collar family and if he dreamt of anything when growing up it was not of being a collector, art patron or business tycoon, but, he says, 'I dreamt about making $12,000 a year and supporting a family.' His horizons expanded when, after leaving college with a business degree, he was posted by the us army to France for two-and-a-half years in the mid-1950s. There he visited the Louvre and became hooked. 'Every minute I could take, I spent at the Louvre and that led me to all the other great European art museums. During the week I'd go to the library and read to get ready for the next trip: that's how I got the idea for the travel business.'

In 1959 Ebsworth founded INTRAV, a charter travel company. He explains, 'I was very lucky. The middle class was expanding and Europe had recovered from the Second World War. The year I started the travel business was the year the 707s started flying across the Atlantic, and that really was the beginning. I was able to catch all the new trends, charter new planes and fly them all over the world, start one of the first cruise lines: it all happened in my lifetime.' Ebsworth founded two cruise lines, in 1972 and 1981, both subsequently sold, and in 1999 INTRAV, by then a luxury travel company, sold for $115m. Ebsworth founded his own venture capital company, Windsor Inc, in 1979. His investments included $2m in the start-up costs for Build-A-Bear in 1997 as a result of an article he saw in a local paper about a business plan that allowed customers to customise their own teddy bears. Other investors swiftly followed: by 2004 there were stores in malls across America and Ebsworth had quadrupled his investment.

Clearly Ebsworth has more than a knack for spotting gaps in the market. 'I think the being that put the collection together was the same being that made the companies successful', he reflects. 'I came to realise that by focusing you can understand something that nobody else understands.' His first purchase, in the early 1970s, was a Dutch 17th-century landscape, which now hangs in his bathroom, but, 'I realised that I'd never acquire the best works or the expertise in that field.' He considered French Impressionists, but again, 'I was just too late in the game.'

He then took advice from the then director of St Louis Art Museum, Charles Buckley, who told him about the Ashcan School. Ebsworth became intrigued by the American modernists, such as Marsden Huntley, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin and Edward Hopper. On Buckley's advice he purchased O'Keeffe's Black White and Blue in 1973 (Fig 5). 'Everyone was buying flowers, so a year later Georgia's dealer called me offering me another abstract painting, which I bought, and I was off. Now there's no way of putting a first-class collection of American Modernism together because there are no pictures left'.

What was the secret of his success? 'American pragmatism! And I think I understood American Modernism better than most Americans because all my learning had been overseas in the army in Europe. So I didn't know anything about American art before 1970--I didn't know Warhol, Pollock, I'm not even sure I knew Edward Hopper--so I came to American art with European eyes and perhaps I saw what others didn't. Yet nothing, other than my daughter, her children, and my good friends, has been more important to me than the process of learning about the art that I have bought. It's not owning the individual pieces: I could go to a museum or gallery to see great paintings. Instead it is the emotional and intellectual experience of collecting that has been the most glorious and rewarding aspect of my life.'

Photographs by Brian Smale.

Rose Aidin is a freelance writer and a teacher of art history.

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Author:	Aidin, Rose
Publication:	Apollo
Article Type:	Interview
Geographic Code:	4EUUK
Date:	Oct 1, 2008
Words:	1516
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