I’ve visited impressive galleries of all sizes over the years. But none of those collections – not the National Gallery, not the Louvre nor MoMA – delivered an experience as unique and memorable as the gallery I visited in late December 1999.
This collection wasn’t open to the general public. It no longer exists. It was a private gallery in the Chicago Ritz-Carlton penthouse apartment of Beatrice ‘Buddy’ Mayer.
Maybe the idea of a private art collection conjures up a specific ideal: valuable if publicly obscure works, maybe a minor piece by a household name.
In fact, this gallery contained works by Picasso, Warhol, Renoir, Manet, Lichtenstein, Lowry, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Henry Moore, Chagall, Magritte, Sisley, Pissarro, Miró, Rodin, and Pollock.
Many of these works had been acquired directly from the artists. The collection had its own full-time curator.
Maintaining such a collection in paid lodgings is not without precedent. Joseph Duveen was the most influential art dealer of the 20th century; it was reported that, wherever he stayed, whether it was at Claridges or some other far-flung hotel, his suite “was transformed into a small-scale art gallery”.
In terms of art per square inch, I doubt even Duveen could compete with the eclectic collection I witnessed in Buddy Mayer’s penthouse
A Warhol in the office
In 2003, writer Barbara Snyder was granted a rare visit to Buddy’s apartment. She called it “the wildest house tour ever”, noting that on entering the place “for a moment, it’s impossible to speak.”
Her reaction was understandable: there was art not only on every available wall but also on most of the surfaces, including shelves of ceramic art from the Han and T’ang dynasties.
At times, one encountered a surreal collision of the domestic and the sublime. In the bedroom, Madame Paul Gallimard, the subject of a Renoir portrait, gazed serenely over a dense cluster of framed family photos.
Above Buddy’s unremarkable office desk, where someone else might have hung a laminated wall calendar, was one of 13 iconic portraits Andy Warhol produced in the autumn of 1963, titled simply Liz.
Her acquisition of this unique collection is a story of romance, serendipity and enterprise.
![An uncommonly handsome and charismatic man smiles enigmatically in a fashionable brown moleskin suit next to ‘Liz [Early Colored Liz]’ (1963) by Andy Warhol. Photo from Blackmore family collection. Artwork from the Robert B and Beatrice C Mayer Family Collection. All artwork depicted under Fair Use allowance. No copyright infringement intended.](https://i0.wp.com/brightmargins.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Nicholas-and-Warhol-Liz-featured-Buddy-Mayer-apartment-.jpeg?resize=1200%2C1200&ssl=1)
A simple grocer’s daughter
Montreal-born Buddy was the daughter of Nathan Cummings, founder of Consolidated Foods, the company that evolved into the Sara Lee Corporation.
Time referred to Cummings as ‘the Duke of Groceries’. A February 1944 report explained – with a Runyonesque flourish – that “under the very noses of the alpaca-sleeved grocer barons, dapper, cold-eyed Nathan Cummings, 47, has fashioned himself a duchy.”
Sara Lee went on to become an American consumer goods behemoth through the second half of the 20th century.
For a self-professed “simple grocer’s daughter”, Buddy (so called because her father said she was “his rosebud”) grew up to be an enterprising and industrious woman.
She got a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, joined the Red Cross Home Service amid the Second World War and, in the 1960s, travelled south to offer volunteer support African-American voter registration in Mississippi. There she slept in a shack and tutored children about the work of African-American artists.
Buddy met her future husband, Robert ‘Bob’ B Mayer, on a blind date in 1947, which is where the curatorial portion of her story begins.
From Impressionism to Pop Art
One of Bob’s major contributions to their union seems to have been a contagious enthusiasm for art. Over time the couple showed a consistent aptitude for collecting, making bold choices that paid off handsomely.
They bought their first painting together, a Renoir portrait, when the valuation of Impressionist works wasn’t quite as exorbitant as it is today. Bob rose through the ranks of his uncle’s firm, Maurice L. Rothschild & Co, but by the early 1960s the Mayers found themselves priced out of the European market. They became early adopters of avant garde work, most of it produced closer to home.
They acquired abstract expressionist work and, more significantly, branched out into pop art in the 1960s. When they gave prominence to works like Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Lichtenstein’s Keds at home, it inspired incredulity among their friends.
The Mayers’ 3,000-piece collection was eventually displayed in seven gallery spaces that they added to their Illinois mansion. (The Chicago Sun Times led its obituary for Buddy with a striking photo of the couple in one of the galleries.) In the late 1960s they co-founded the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.
“Bob and Buddy created a lasting legacy in art,” auction house Christie’s observed. “Through their patronage of emerging artists, they helped to secure the success of some of the 20th century’s most important figures.”
Following Bob’s untimely death in 1974, the collection was reduced to a fifth and much of it loaned to several museums.
What was selected to remain in the Ritz-Carlton apartment was, effectively, Buddy’s personal story.
An introduction from Picasso
As we toured her penthouse, Buddy, then in her late 70s, told us the anecdotes behind the acquisitions.
She explained how, while on leave from the US army in the early 1940s, Bob had taken his jeep to visit Picasso in his studio, and acquired not only a still life from the artist, but also a letter of introduction to Matisse.
On arriving at Matisse’s Vence studio Bob used all the money he had left in his pocket ($75) to purchase a drawing.
In the 1950s, Buddy and Bob visited Mexico City in search of Diego Rivera. They eventually located him in the bough of a tree, where he was painting. Rivera let down his ladder so they could climb up to talk with him, and they later left with two watercolour commissions.
The Mayers acquired a Chagall work, The Troth, depicting the artist with his wife, Bella. Years later, following Bella’s death, Chagall was in town and met up with the Mayers. On seeing his wife’s likeness on the canvas again, the artist was overcome with emotion.
Buddy was a cheerful and unobtrusive presence, used to drip-feeding these anecdotes to visitors of all ages. You might have mistaken the heiress for a retired gallery volunteer, were it not for a portrait – sharing space with the Warhol – in which she was painted surrounded by orbiting Sara Lee products.
Art and Americana
That I was lucky enough to visit the penthouse was down to a combination of obscure high-societal connections and impending nuptials.
My family was visiting Chicago for a wedding. An unexpected tour of Buddy’s penthouse had been graciously added to our itinerary by the groom’s family, in part as a thank-you for making the 8,000-mile round trip.
I was barely 19 years old. This was an era when a visit to the US was still, in several key senses, akin to a trip to the moon. It was a rare and costly expedition across a vast distance. On arrival, my sense of wonder was balanced by my frantic attempts to gather as much data and material as possible. The return journey was fraught by significant weight-allowance conundrums.
My infatuation with US culture bled into my assessment of Buddy’s art collection. The pieces that I connected with were the ones that, in one form or another, carried the junky tang of Americana.
Naturally this appreciation extended to the Warhol piece. But it also took in one of Richard Estes’ photorealist marvels, Key Food, and, in stark stylistic contrast, Robert Indiana’s dramatic 1965 piece, The Confederacy: Mississippi – purchased at an auction to benefit the Coalition for Racial Equality.
The rarest Rauschenberg
Then there was the living room triptych. On the left, Wayne Thiebaud’s paean to the sacramental consumption of the hot dog, Quick Snack. On the right, Larry Rivers dissipating oil and charcoal portrait, The Last Civil War Veteran – the Mayers’ first meaningful acquisition of contemporary art.
Hanging between them was perhaps the most memorable work in Buddy’s apartment collection, Robert Rauschenberg’s epic silkscreen Buffalo II,
It also proved to be the most valuable work. “Everyone has been waiting for this painting,’’ Christie’s international director observed ahead of the 2019 sale of the collection.
Purchased by the Mayers for $16,900, it was sold for the estimate-shattering figure of $88M.
The rumoured purchaser was Alice Walton, the second richest woman in the world.
An awkward inventory
Buddy had no issue with us taking pictures of her art with our pre-digital Konica SLR. Several photos memorialise me standing awkwardly in a tan moleskin suit (again, this was the Nineties).
Despite the warm welcome, it was difficult not to feel slightly on edge at times, surrounded as we were at almost every turn by breathtakingly valuable artwork. We had refreshments at a table next to a row of antique oriental vases; there was an L.S. Lowry landscape a couple of inches behind my mum’s head.
As we made small talk, we tried to keep reasonable mental notes about what we had seen. Shortly after we’d said our farewells, my dad scrawled an inventory – Henry Moore: 1, Warhol: 3, Picasso: 3 (6 plates) – on a note of hotel stationery. Then we headed out to brave the wintery headwinds.
We never encountered Buddy again. She died aged 97 in 2018. Her numerous philanthropic endeavours apparently continued right into her final years.
Movies and memories
A visit to an aladdin’s cave of 19th and 20th century art would be the undoubted highlight of most holidays. But I was still a teenager, and in love not just with the USA but with Chicago and all its icons: the Bulls, the John Hancock Tower, Navy Pier.
Even the postnuptial brunch at the Drake Hotel (where Buddy and Bob had married 50 years earlier) was transfigured into a pop-cultural pilgrimage – the location had been a prominent plot point in the big-screen adaptation of Mission: Impossible.
Within the compressed schedule of the trip, an abundance of cheap thrills competed for my attention. I insisted on seeing as many blockbusters as possible, weeks or even months ahead of their British release date. (We managed four: The Green Mile, Toy Story 2, Sleepy Hollow and Stuart Little).
Compared to a visit to Buddy’s penthouse, each of these experiences was a rapidly depreciating asset: valuable right up until everyone in the UK got to see the same movie.
But two decades on, those evenings spent gorging myself on new releases and silos of buttery popcorn define the trip just as much as a selfie with Buffalo II.
That seems apt enough. Despite its considerable financial and reputational value, the art that Buddy retained after her husband’s death ultimately amounted to a collection of memories.
That’s the thing about a private gallery: it’s built on sentimental value.
All artwork depicted under Fair Use allowance, with reference to section 107 of the Copyright Act in 1976. No copyright infringement intended.
