Japanese National Stadium commissioned for the 2020 Olympics. So Tabanca flew to Tokyo to see him. It was a meeting of minds. The area where OMM is located is full of traditional Ottoman houses, which meant stringent planning restrictions as well as a challenging slope. But Kuma was fascinated by the “very specific form of construction used in these houses, a process called bagdadi involving stacks of intersected wooden beams that are then grouted together,” says Tabanca. There may be 4,500 square metres of floor space, but the building, which resembles a succession of irregularly proportioned slatted boxes that descend downhill – has a scale that is modest and inviting, allowing passers-by glimpses of what’s inside. As to the question of succession, for one cannot confidently leave a legacy without knowing who presides over it, it is already chaired by his daughter, Idil Tabanca. Her taste, he is quick to point out, is more adventurous than his, embracing conceptual artists such as Inci Eviner, whereas he prefers figurative work, artists such as Fahrelnissa Zeid, “one of the most important modernera artists of Turkey”. But he sees their disagreements as a positive. “In a way, it’s a clash of two generations,” he says. “Sometimes there are little disputes, but they can bear fruit and lead to exciting results. It’s good to have two perspectives, to see things from two sides. I think it’s right not always to be subjective when buying art.” Tastes can, however, concur across generations. “Collecting is not only part of our foundation, it is our way of living,” says Othman Lazraq, also an architect by training as well as director of the Fondation Alliances, a non-profit dedicated to cultural development in Morocco, which he and his father, Alami Lazraq, founder of the Casablanca-based real-estate developer Groupe Alliances, established. “Art is what we talk about during lunch, during dinner. And when we’re travelling, we’ll go to museums and galleries together.” Alami had started collecting long before Othman was born, and Othman, who has a particular interest in photography, bought his first work at 20. “One day we woke up, my dad and I, and said, ‘Right, we have more than 2,500 works. It’s time to do something with them, something to benefit the art ecosystem here in Morocco.’” The result was one of the first of its kind on the continent, the Musée d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden, better known as MACAAL, in Marrakech, its adjoining sculpture park (both well worth the trip) as well as a raft of other initiatives both to nurture and support artists and art-world professionals in Morocco and encourage visitors (not least with free couscous on Friday evenings). Their collection was originally focused on Moroccan artists, but now embraces works by artists from across the African continent and is beginning to extend into South Asia and Latin America. “Marrakech has always been considered a door to Africa,” Othman says. “We’re at the tip, facing Europe and America. So we wanted to create a sort of crossroads between Africa and the rest of the world. This is our mission.” To which end, “we have built a very strong network of individuals, who advise us on African art and where is it heading to,” he says. “Because collecting when you have a museum today is not only about vision. You have a responsibility, too. When I buy a work, I know I will have to show it at some point, so it needs to be important and to bring something to the collection. But at the same time, I also buy from emerging artists.” And those artists need their work to be seen. “The day we opened MACAAL,” he continues, “the Moroccan artist Mustapha Akrim came up to me and said: ‘I would like to say thank you.’ I said, ‘For what?’ And he said, ‘For this initiative, because now I can now show my art in my own country. I no longer have to knock on doors in the West to get approval. I can find approval here.’” Like almost all good museums, there’s a shop (an excellent one) at MACAAL and a cafe, but when it comes to diversification into retail and restaurants, no private art institution comes close to Château La Coste near Aix-en- Provence in the South of France, an estate dating back to the 17th century where vines, olives and lavender are still cultivated, and the landscape is dotted with more than 40 often site-specific works by the likes of Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder … along with buildings by many of the world’s starriest architects, among them Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. There’s even an auditorium by Oscar Niemeyer. Wise to the fact that art parks – even those that attract thousands of paying visitors a day – can never be self-supporting, however, its owner Paddy McKillen, whose business interests embrace a stake in the company that owns London’s Claridge’s, Connaught and Berkeley, has been diversifying into projects to generate an income to sustain it. 88
People ask: aren’t I feeling pain at losing this collection?... But I don’t feel any of that. I built that collection. I’m proud of it. And now these works are going to be someone else’s — Benedict Silverman First came a winery designed by Jean Nouvel; then a succession of restaurants, currently helmed by Hélène Darroze and Francis Mallmann. (No one cooks steak on an open fire like him.) And then a fabulous (and commensurately expensive) hotel, Villa La Coste, its rooms decorated with works on paper from McKillen’s collection, and one of just 31 in France to have been awarded the rare Palace Distinction, which puts it on the level with The Ritz, the Plaza-Athénée and the rest of Paris’s great grandes dames. And, of course, there’s a store, too, on-site and online, the latter selling original art by some of the artists – Sophie Calle, Jeppe Hein, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Sean Scully, Conrad Shawcross – whose sculpture can be found here. La Coste may be a thriving concern, but “the worrying thing for nutcases like me is what happens if I get hit by a bus tomorrow,” McKillen has said. “Because I don’t want this to be a folly or burden for those left behind. Château La Coste has to sustain itself and feed the future.” Fortunately for fans of La Coste, McKillen has longevity in his genes. But as any auction house employee will tell you, sales of works of art tend to be occasioned by one of the “three Ds”: death, debt or divorce. It’s less usual for a collector to sell in anticipation of his demise. But that’s what the New York-based property developer Benedict Silverman, then 83, decided to do. Over 40 years, he had amassed an outstanding collection of Austrian and German art by the likes of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Oskar Schlemmer, as well as Wiener Werkstätte and French Art Nouveau furniture. But his three children had no interest in it, and Ronald Lauder had already opened an outstanding museum of 20th-century German and Austrian art in New York, the Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue. Silverman’s other passion was philanthropy, specifically the funding of literacy programmes on the grounds that “if a kid doesn’t learn to read, what’s he or she going to do? Where will they be going? Nowhere? Jail? I don’t know. But at least if they can read, they have a chance.” His art was valued at US0 million, and the revenue from its sale went to a US charity called the Literacy Trust. As the gallerist Richard Nagy, who both found works for Silverman and then sold the now-dispersed collection, recalls: “He was one of the few collectors I knew who really thought about his art day by day. He’d pour himself a glass of wine, sit down in front of a painting and consider how it was made, why it was made, where it was made … I can’t think of another collector who allowed himself to engage with their art the way he did. So I thought it would be devastating for him to part with it.” B ut Silverman was philosophical. “I loved collecting,” he told me at the time of the sale. “It was fantastic. I would chase objects. I would burn when I wanted something. I was passionate. And I would pay whatever was necessary to get them. I enjoyed every moment of looking at them in my living room. I liked it better than any museum. But in the long term, we’re all only ever temporary custodians of what we collect. People ask: aren’t I feeling pain at losing this collection? Don’t I feel a sense of loss? But I don’t feel any of that. I built that collection. I’m proud of it. And now these works are going to be someone else’s.” He had, he said, decided to embrace “a different kind of life. You know what [the British Romantic poet William] Wordsworth wrote: ‘The world is too much with us; late and soon;/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…’ Well, I’m just done with getting and spending. It was part of my past life, and I loved it. But now I’m looking to the future.” He died four years later, but his legacy lives on in the hundreds of thousands of young people he has helped learn to read. Maybe someday they will come to love art the way he did. 89
