The Experience

During an interview with Steve Wiecking of Seattle Metropolitan, the journalist posed what Barney considered the entire question of his collecting life: If you had the choice between having the pictures or having the experience, which would you take?

That philosophy is what Barney tells new collectors. You are not going to get rich buying contemporary art — more than 99 percent of it will never be worth more than you paid, he says, no matter the hype. Dealers don't have masterworks to sell; they're selling what they can as soon as the paint dries. The question is simple: which pictures do you want to live with? Which ones come alive for you?

Barney is candid about the fact that his collection has significantly appreciated in value. But he didn't buy art as investment. He bought pictures he wanted to live with — and his pre-2012 philanthropic posture reflected the same value system. He wasn't trying to be a great collector. He was trying to learn about great art.

Chop Suey, and the Fence Barney Had to Jump

In 1973, dealer Bill Zierler — who had sold Barney a great Edward Hopper watercolor, Cottages at North Truro, Massachusetts, for $65,000 the year before — had a new Hopper on consignment: a 1929 oil called Chop Suey. Two women in a Chinese restaurant. It looked like a movie scene. Barney thought it was stunning. The asking price was $200,000.

Barney didn't want to spend that much on a picture. The dealer called after a few days of silence. Barney, don't you want to buy this picture? Barney told the truth: he loved it, he thought the price was fair, he just wasn't prepared to spend that much. The dealer negotiated down to $180,000. Still too much, in Barney's head.

Then Barney got creative. Send back the Hopper watercolor he'd bought the year before for $65,000, refund it, and the net cost of Chop Suey comes to $115,000. It was really just some mental gymnastics to get myself to jump over the fence I'd created for myself, he writes. The dealer couldn't do it — he was on consignment. Barney countered: take an interest-free $65,000 loan for a year. Done.

Three days later the paperwork arrived. Barney considered the letter, looked at his watercolor, and sent a check for $180,000. He couldn't part with the watercolor after all. And he had crossed his own mental threshold. The ceiling, once broken, did not restore itself. He kept inching up.

Chop Suey appeared on the cover of the catalog for Barney's first exhibition and went on to appear in more than thirty others. In the late 1990s a buyer offered Barney $60 million. He said no. No great Hoppers remained on the market; his had become precious. Later he bought another Hopper he loved almost as much — The French Six-Day Bicycle Rider, painted after Hopper's visits to the indoor races at Madison Square Garden. That one Barney earmarked for his daughter, because, he reasoned, when she was old she would likely be the only person left to own an Edward Hopper oil painting outside a museum.

The Living Art World

Barney met most of the people you would expect to meet when you own paintings that other people want to see. Some were sharp. Some were so quiet they refused to make eye contact.

At a small Ronnie Greenberg dinner party, Andy Warhol was the guest of honor. Five or six people. Warhol didn't speak one word all evening. Barney says it wasn't an act; it's just how he was. At the Cannes Carlton Hotel, Barney spent twelve hours with Ed Sullivan, lunch and dinner, before Ed said a single sentence (I'm tired; I'm going to go to bed.) His wife did the talking.

Steve Martin had a New York apartment at the Carlyle Hotel, and before they'd even met, Barney went by with a dealer to evaluate a nineteenth-century picture Martin owned. Barney asked to use the bathroom. He didn't need it. I want to be able to say I had a drink in Steve Martin's apartment, he told the dealer. When they later met and became friends, Martin was amazed Barney could name the artist of every piece on his walls, many of them obscure. Nobody has ever been able to name every artist before, Martin said. Barney replied: You're not the only wild and crazy guy in this house now.

Dan Terra, the Reagan-era fundraiser who became America's first (and only) U.S. Ambassador of Art, invited Barney to the opening of his Chicago museum in 1980. After trying to explain to Barney the Arthur Dove pastel A Walk: Poplars — which Barney already knew had been sold at the Edith Halpert sale on March 14, 1973, for $19,000 — Terra blinked and asked for Barney's card. That evening at the Drake Hotel ballroom, the lights dimmed and a big band struck up Yankee Doodle Dandy. Dan Terra came tap dancing across the stage dressed as Uncle Sam. A friend seated next to Barney was horrified. Barney thought it was terrific. You wouldn't do something like this, Barney, the friend said. I would if I had the talent, Barney replied.

The F-111 That Got Away

Barney had decided, a few months before his first exhibition, to expand into later twentieth-century art. The first picture he wanted was the largest one available: James Rosenquist's F-111 — 86 feet wide, 10 feet high, filling all four walls of a room. He thought he'd add a room to his house with black marble flooring and Vietnam-era music on a great stereo.

The auction was like the Academy Awards. Anyone who wasn't a player couldn't get a ticket; standing room only, overflow into two or three peripheral rooms watching on TV screens. Barney usually sat in the sixth row, aisle, center section; Eli Broad preferred the fifth. This time they sat him in the first row, under the auctioneer's nose. The estimate was about $1 million. Barney's strategy was to wait until the end and land the winning bid. He knocked out the Whitney's director Tom Armstrong at $1.25 million, then ran it up against another end-bidder to $2 million in about twelve seconds.

Two million was Barney's limit. He violated it only a few times in his career, never by much. Jeffrey Deitch made the winning bid. The room applauded — the previous Rosenquist record had been $175,000.

A reporter from the New York Times descended on Barney. He waved her off. The woman sitting behind him congratulated him on a great picture and asked where he was going to put it.

The 1987 Exhibition — and the National Gallery, 2000

Barney's collection first went on public view on November 20, 1987, in St. Louis. It traveled to Honolulu and then the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The show was The Ebsworth Collection: American Modernism, 1911–1947. Barney chose three essayists for the catalog, all museum directors or ex-directors — Charles Buckley, William Agee, John Lane. I don't know of another exhibition where all of the essayists have been directors, he writes.

In 2000, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. mounted Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection. The show then traveled to the Seattle Art Museum at Barney's insistence, since by then Seattle was his home. This time, unlike 1987, Barney didn't curate or organize — he had satisfied his curiosity about running an exhibition. He just signed off on the pictures and let the machine do its work.