Clive Davis’ Art Collection Brings Warhol, Basquiat, and Hockney to Christie’s This Fall
The legendary producer’s artworks are the opening salvo for New York’s fall auction season
Record executive Clive Davis was a music industry titan who broke the mold on perennial relevance. So it’s no surprise that his art collection, which will be included in the Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale on November 2, shows foresight in line with his eye for talent. The selection coming to auction includes works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fernando Botero, Jean Dubuffet, David Hockney, Joan Mitchell, and Frank Stella.
“Mr. Davis built his collection with the same instinct he brought to his work as a masterful music executive. When he encountered artworks that resonated with him, he was bold in his decision-making—which manifested in this truly best-in-class collection of post-war and contemporary pieces, ranging in movement and style,” explained William Featherby of Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Department. “In both his musical career and in building his personal collection, decisions were made from the heart.”
Davis, who died earlier this year at 94, was such an automatic entrant to the Billboard Power 100 that the magazine chose to make him an honorary Power 100 Hall of Famer rather than continue to rank him every year. He steered the careers of a rogues’ gallery of the past six decades’ greatest names in pop: Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel, Whitney Houston, Alicia Keys, Janis Joplin, Barry Manilow, Carlos Santana, Patti Smith, Jennifer Hudson, Aerosmith, Billy Joel, Dionne Warwick, Rod Stewart, and the Grateful Dead.
While other magnates rose and fell, Clive Davis’s annual pre-Grammys gala remained a must-attend for the entertainment elite; one notable exception was Jimmy Iovine in 2016, who happened to be getting married at David Geffen’s Beverly Hills home on the same day as the event, which created an impossible scheduling conflict for much of the music industry’s A-list, many of whom attempted to attend both parties.
But Aretha Franklin was always his arguable crown jewel, so it is fitting that one of the highlight pieces in the show is an image of the great singer by none other than Andy Warhol: an icon of an icon, by an icon who was perhaps the 20th century’s most iconographic portraitist. The crossover comes with a lunchtime tale, as Featherby related to Galerie: “Davis had known Warhol ever since he signed Lou Reed and Patti Smith (Warhol had managed Reed’s band The Velvet Underground in the 1960s) and was a frequent visitor to Studio 54, where the two would often bump into each other. After a lunch with Andy, during which time Davis enthralled him with the latest gossip from the music world, Davis broached the subject of producing a portrait of Franklin. Andy immediately agreed, and eventually it was finished to the delight of all parties: ‘Both Aretha and I loved it,’ Clive said.”
Christie’s has released a presale estimate of $35 million for the Clive Davis collection, but has not released individual estimates for the majority of the works as of Wednesday. However, it would not be surprising for many of the individual works to outperform their eventual estimates if provenance and subject matter have anything to say about it.
