Hungry for Art – Jon Landau
Jon Landau, the renowned manager of Bruce Springsteen, sat down with Nicholas Hall to discuss his enduring passion as a collector of European Old Masters. Nicholas recalls almost 32 years ago, to this day, Jon made himself known to the Old Masters world with his successful bid to acquire Tintoretto’s Raising of Lazarus at Sotheby’s New York. Since then, together with his wife Barbara, Jon has built a remarkable private collection of paintings and sculpture spanning the Italian Renaissance and Baroque to 19th-Century France. At the heart of it is a unique group of 16th-century Venetian paintings. In recent years he has turned increasingly to philanthropic projects, such as the restoration of the Maestà mosaic at Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello and the Gattamelata sculpture in Padova.
Jon Landau – Hungry for Art
Jon, can you tell us how your life as a collector began?
When I think about how I got started, I think about my uncle Herbert, my father’s older brother. Around 74–75, maybe a little later, when I’d moved to New York, he called me up. He said, ‘Jonny, what are you doing tomorrow? I want to do something to welcome you, and let’s go hit a few golf balls.’ That didn’t work out, so then he said, ‘Let’s go look at pictures.’ Barbara and I had started to become a couple, and so the two of us on Saturdays would go with him. He would start at 10 o’clock in the morning, and I can’t tell you how many pictures we would see — museums, galleries, just a whirlwind. He had a great way of explaining, tremendous enthusiasm, and he collected very modestly but very regularly. One day a little vanitas skull still life really caught our eye, and it cost $1,000. I was doing reasonably well by then, and I could afford $1,000, and we bought it, and it’s still hanging on the second floor of our home 50 years later. Now, why was that such a pivotal event? Well, here’s why, and I’ve reflected on this. At the point that you recognize that living with a work of art has any value at all, you’re going down a slippery slope. I’ve lived to tell the tale.
As part of my work, I get to travel a great deal in Europe, and that is because my dear friend Mr. Springsteen has become, through his monumental effort and my somewhat secondary effort, incredibly popular in Europe. So we go there every two to three years for our tours. We go everywhere, and there’s a good amount of downtime because he can do two to three shows a week, and it’s a pretty luxurious way to go, and what I do is I spend every spare second looking at museums, collections, and so forth. I had been looking at Old Master painting and becoming more and more interested in it. What I found myself gravitating to was Venetian painting, and within Venetian painting I found myself gravitating to Tintoretto. If somebody said to me, ‘who’s your favorite artist?’ — that’s my answer. And it’s a very hard field to enter into, because there are a lot of things you have to worry about, or people encourage you to worry about: attribution, condition, what workshop, you know, was this little thing here by him up here in the corner or not, and so forth. I had seen all the great Tintoretto sites, San Rocco in Venice — you know, I was well educated about the artist.
I saw this picture, and said, ‘that’s my picture’ — I was working with a particular dealer at the time, and I just said to him, we’re bidding on this picture, you know. And there wasn’t that much bidding and the reason why — and I was too naive to know this — is that the Kimbell Museum was deaccessioning the picture, and because of their status, and justifiably so, people tended to be a little guarded, because they assumed if they were deaccessioning it, you know, no museum is going to buy at auction a painting another museum is deaccessioning. I didn’t know any of this, so I didn’t know what to be inhibited. So the bottom line is I bought the painting — an extraordinary example of beginner’s luck.
‘I don’t need someone to tell me what picture to fall in love with. I need people who will throw up a red light if I’m making a mistake. A mistake is not falling in love with the wrong picture.’
What are the other important criteria that inform you when you’re making your decision? How important is subject matter for you, for example?
Well, you know, to me a picture is not greater or lesser because of what it’s a painting of. It’s about painting itself. Nonetheless, you can’t ignore subject matter, and some people gravitate to one thing or another. For example, a wonderful, wonderful collector, sadly gone — Aso Tavitian — that so many of you in the room, I think, knew, loved portraits, and we exchanged visits early on in getting to know each other, and he came to our place, which has got a very substantial group of religious works. When he left, his very lovely compliment was, you know, he says, ‘Wow, these things really work in a home. I have to rethink this.’ He never did. But I do have that strange Jewish collector affinity for Christian subject matter. Keith (Christiansen, former chief curator of European paintings at the Met) has accused me of — he says, ‘there’s a nice Catholic boy hiding in there’, you know — and Bruce, who I’ve worked with for 52 years, is as Catholic as can be, and his music is completely suffused with Catholic imagery. I did marry a lapsed Catholic, so all those Ecce homos that Nick can’t sell to anybody else, he sends them my way!
What sort of advice have you had so far in making your collections, and has there been anyone, apart from you and Barbara, who helped form your collection?
Well, in addition to my uncle Herbert… indeed, several people, many people. We are our own curators. But over time, you create a network of friends. I think of the entity of this room, where I have many, many friends, and the whole interface between curators, dealers, collectors, as really just people with a shared interest. I had become friendly with Nicholas when he had his well-remembered Hall and Knight Gallery, with his great partner Richard Knight. And one day he called me and said, ‘I really think you should meet a fellow named Keith Christiansen.’ And this was 25, 30 years ago now. And I came over, and they were looking at a painting by Goffredo Wals for a possible acquisition by the Metropolitan. I loved this painting. I’m looking at the Goffredo Wals, and I’m listening to Keith for the first time, and I got this idea in my head. I said, I think this guy knows a lot.
I don’t need someone to tell me what picture to fall in love with. I need help, and the way I put it is, you know, I need people who will throw up a red light if I’m making a mistake. A mistake is not falling in love with the wrong picture. The mistake is, ‘hey, it’s not by the artist that you’re supposed to be by, or the condition, you’re missing something’— things that I wouldn’t know. But our approach to collecting is you fall in love first, and then you ask. I’m not the person, so, I was reading an interview with a collector, and he said, ‘you know, the stories are almost as good as the pictures.’ No, they’re not. Not for me. It’s about the picture.
To what extent would you say that your collection is a work in progress? How does it evolve?
Well, the thing about it is that, you know, everybody deaccessions. The Metropolitan Museum deaccessions …
The Kimbell deaccessions.
Thank goodness. Forgive me for saying this, Patrice (Marandel), but the great paintings that Patrice assembled at the LA County Museum — one of the great collecting building programs during his tenure — are not being shown. People like me are sitting around waiting for: when are they going to start deaccessioning them, so some real collectors can get their hands on them now. And it’s a terrible thing, but, I mean, really.
We do sell pictures. I’ve only sold pictures to buy other pictures. We owned a painting by Frans Hals. I love Frans Hals. I’ve never been interested in collecting Dutch painting. Still, this particular picture, which was a miniature, six inches, was a portrait of a man named Samuel Ampzing, and I saw it at the Frans Hals show at the National Gallery, circa 1990 or something, you know. I bought it, and I loved that damn thing, but at a certain point I had to choose between it and something else, which I couldn’t afford. I said to myself, ‘We’re not Dutch painting collectors; I’m never going to buy another Dutch painting,’ and I gave that up — which I did, also, with the two Rubens that we bought. It was a slightly arbitrary way of making a decision. I had to sell something. Now, the painting was so spectacular, I regret selling it. I don’t sit around thinking about, ‘oh, I wish we had done this, that, or the other thing,’ much. If I had to say, ‘did I make a mistake?’ — that was a mistake.
‘At the point that you recognize that living with a work of art has any value at all, you’re going down a slippery slope.’
Is there anything you regret, that you might have bought, that you feel maybe you should have bought, but that got away, any that got away?
Oh, yeah, of course, everybody has a few of those, but I have one in particular. I love the artist Lorenzo Lotto, and I’ve been in search of a great Lorenzo Lotto. I’d love to get a great, great Bellini, but I know the Bellini that would be good enough for the collection isn’t going to be affordable. I have a good budget. But I’m often competing with people who have no budget, or a limitless budget, so I have to be clever and decisive, and I also know what is doable and what isn’t. A great Lotto I could manage, but there haven’t been any. Years ago, the great dealer Piero Corsini had a portrait by Lotto, and this was very early in our collecting of Old Masters. He showed it to Barbara and to me, and we loved the picture, but it was very expensive — not impossible, but very expensive — and I didn’t have the confidence to buy it. Years later, when our level of appreciation had become more sophisticated, we’re doing a Springsteen concert in the National Gallery, Ottawa, so, of course, where am I? At their great museum. And all of a sudden here’s that Lotto, now that was a f***ing blunder. And then I saw it again, when Matthias Wivel showed it at the National Gallery in London at his beautiful Lotto portrait show. I mean, it’s a very modest picture, it’s not a big picture, it’s oil on paper, but it’s one of his greatest. So not buying that was a blunder.❖
Listen to the full conversation linked above the video