A Portrait of the Artist as a Collector

How much can artworks tell us about the person who acquired them?

- Sarah Douglas

Two years ago, New York Times co-chief art critic Holland Cotter lamented that in 2014 “we lost two of our most imaginative New York gallerists: Hudson, founder of Feature Inc., and Claude Simard, codirector of Shainman Gallery.” Both of them were artists in addition to being gallerists, and it was through Claude that I first heard of Hudson. I worked at Shainman as a college student in the mid-1990s, when the recession of that time still held many New York galleries in its grip, and I remember Claude coming in one afternoon with a Tom of Finland drawing. He’d bought it on his way to the gallery, he said, “to save Hudson.”

Claude bought many different kinds of art for a variety of reasons, not the least of them being generosity. And underscoring them, always, was the basic fact: Claude was a collector, and collectors acquire things because they can’t not do so. Here is how I imagine Claude may have rationalized the Tom of Finland purchase: He liked the drawing, and he liked and admired Hudson, whose gallery was struggling. Surely, he realized the sale of one drawing wouldn’t be enough to save Feature (which did end up surviving that recession), but the idea that he might be helping was probably sufficient justification for Claude to buy it, especially at a time when few art dealers were financially flush, least of all himself.

This spring, Claude’s wide-ranging collection is the subject of an exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, in Saratoga, New York. The show’s curator, Tang director Ian Berry, hopes it will create discussion and debate around collecting: How do collectors collect? How do works enter collections? Claude collected African art, and a key piece in the show, for Berry, is Radcliffe