Those who follow the art world and the art market tend to have a set picture of a collector: he or she is someone established in his or her career, with enough interest in the plastic arts (or their performance as an alternative asset class) that he or she is willing to shell out ungodly sums of money for art by whoever is of the moment. But there is another category of collector: artists themselves. This group is largely immune to trends, acquires objects for less money than you’d expect, and, most importantly, has unrivaled enthusiasm for the work.
Sol LeWitt, who died in 2007, had an exemplary contemporary-art collection—including some 7,000 objects stored in a warehouse in Cheshire, Connecticut—which will be the subject of a show at the Drawing Center in 2016. LeWitt owned work by Mel Bochner, Jonathan Borofsky, Lucinda Childs, Chuck Close, Hanne Darboven, Will Insley, Jeffrey Isaac…the list goes on. He was a great supporter of young and emerging artists, especially artists who worked for him, both giving them his work—and telling them that he didn’t mind if they sold it—and collecting theirs.
