Alex Needham 

Elizabeth Taylor’s art collection to be auctioned

Late actor's collection, including Van Gogh, Degas and Pissarro, goes under the hammer at Christie's in London
  
  

Elizabeth Taylor with her father Francis
Elizabeth Taylor with her father, Francis, an art dealer, in 1954. He bought Van Gogh's Vue de l’Asile de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy on her behalf in 1963. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images Photograph: Popperfoto/popperfoto.com

Elizabeth Taylor was a person of prodigious appetites, most famously for jewellery, fried chicken, and husbands. On Tuesday at Christie's in London, however, a less documented aspect of the star's taste will come into focus when 38 works from her art collection are auctioned.

The sale will begin with the three most significant works going under the hammer: Autoportrait by Edgar Degas, expected to fetch £350,000 to £450,000; Pissarro's Pommiers d'Eragny (£900,000 to £1.2m); and Van Gogh's Vue de l'Asile de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy, whose estimate is £5m to £7m.

"It's the part of her life that nobody knew," said Giovanna Bertazzoni, head of impressionist and modern art at Christie's. "She had as an extraordinary a way of collecting pictures as much as she did jewellery. Take the Degas: one would think she'd go for a race course or ballet scene, but she bought a very pensive early portrait painted. It's a very refined and academic choice – she was a proper collector, not just a buyer."

An appreciation of art ran in Taylor's family: her father, Francis, and great-uncle Howard Young were dealers. Born in London, Francis moved to Hollywood during the second world war and set set up his own gallery in the Beverley Hills Hotel, where it attracted film star clients including Hedda Hopper and Greta Garbo.

Francis Taylor exclusively represented the Welsh painter Augustus John in America, a relationship that had developed when the Taylor family moved into John's former house in Hampstead, where Elizabeth was born in 1932. The Christie's sale includes 21 works by John, including Portrait of Poppet in Black Hat, which Elizabeth inherited from her father and, says Bertazzoni, "cherished all her life".

Unlike jewellery, which she continued to buy up to her death last March, Taylor's art collecting phase ran from the late 50s to the early 70s. Though her taste for impressionist artists was the fashionable choice of the era, Bertazzoni says it was nevertheless distinctive.

"In the 60s and 70s one needed to have a beautiful Van Gogh – it was paramount in a collection. She chose one which is beautiful and very jolly, but it's a got an intense tragic element. It's a view of the asylum where Van Gogh confined himself before killing himself six months later. It's the first time he was allowed out in the fields after six months in a cell, so he's drunk with joy and colour and happiness. There is also an element of tragic humanity which she empathised with."

Taylor's father bought the Van Gogh on her behalf at an auction in 1963, paying £92,000. Her taste for art was also indulged by her third husband, the film producer Mike Todd. His son claimed in 1968 that the producer once visited Taylor in hospital, bringing with him a Monet, a Franz Hals and a Van Gogh to decorate the walls of her ward. He accidentally punched a hole in the Van Gogh with a pencil, but Young was able to mend it.

Taylor continued collecting art during her marriages to Richard Burton, once joking that their home in Bel Air was "such a cozy, sweet place with bits and pieces around—bits and pieces of Renoir—and, you know, things that make it homey."

The pair also kept a bust of Churchill by Jacob Epstein on their yacht, The Kalizma.

"She lived with these paintings – they were in her living room," said Bertazzoni. "Everything was very homogenous – the house was furnished in the same style."

In December, 1,778 lots of Taylor's personal effects, ranging from her most precious jewels to the wig she wore in Cleopatra, were auctioned in New York, raising £103m. The sale of Taylor's jewels alone raised £74,196,480, almost four times the estimated price.

Bertazzoni said she expected bidders from all over the world for Taylor's art collection, especially Russian oligarchs: "we see most of them auctions in London in February."

But Bertazzoni added that she hoped the paintings wouldn't disappear from public view. "I'm always hopeful we'll be able to continue seeing [the work] in a museum. There are some fanatstic museums that are being created in the Middle East at the moment, in Abu Dhabi, so they might be competing as well and we'll all go to see them in the Middle East at some point."

Other famous art collectors

Yves Saint Laurent

The late fashion designer's art collection was amassed over 50 years and auctioned in 2009. Described as "the art sale of the century", the 733 lots raised £307m, including work by Matisse, Picasso and Mondrian.

Elton John

The singer has a huge collection of 20th-century photography, which received unwelcome publicity when a Nan Goldin image of two children he loaned for a 2007 exhibition of her work at the Baltic gallery was seized by police after complaints it was indecent. He also once commissioned Gary Hume to make an art work for his shower.

Madonna

The Times claimed in 2009 that Madonna's art collection was worth £80m, taking in some 300 works by artists including Léger, Dali, Man Ray and Damien Hirst. She has at least two works by Frida Kahlo: My Birth, which she loaned to Tate Modern, and Self-Portrait With a Monkey.

Roman Abramovich

In 2009, the oligarch and owner of Chelsea football club was named by Art News as the biggest collector in the world. In 2008 he spent £61.4m on just two works: £17m Lucien Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping and £44.2m on a 1976 Francis Bacon tryptich. He is currently developing an "art island" off St Petersburg to display his collection.

 

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