A pair of happy-looking wooden bears, the kind you can find in any toy store, wave at visitors shuffling through Tate Modern's permanent collectionin London.
They're Jeff Koons' Winter Bears (1988), and were owned by former art dealer Anthony d'Offay until he sold them and hundreds of other works to Britain at a deep discount. "Do you think that was Mr and Mrs Koons waving goodbye to little Jeffrey on the first day of kindergarten?" says 69-year-old d'Offay with a smile, as he shows me seven roomfuls of works in Tate Modern that were once his. There are Warhol hamburger and gun diptychs, and a giant Anselm Kiefer palm tree.
D'Offay last year sold 725 postwar and contemporary works to the nation at the price he paid for them, forgoing an estimated profit of some £100 million (HK$1.278 billion). He had bought them for £26.5 million and they were valued last year at £125 million. His proviso: that they tour the country, giving under-18s easy access to recent art.
"Museums in this country are free, which is a great gift to the British people, but they have no money with which to buy," says d'Offay. "If I'm able to help to improve the collections in this country, then I feel like a good guy."
Some of the works are on tour in 18 museums and galleries under the auspices of the Artist Rooms project backed by The Art Fund. For the first time, a national collection is being shown simultaneously across Britain, with each venue showcasing works by specific artists. The initiative has already secured funding for 2010 with the 2011 allocation to be confirmed bynext summer.
The former dealer has parted with most of his wealth, and is now worth "something like £25 million". He retains a London home in Regent's Park and an apartment in New York. "Three meals a day, a home and a holiday, that's all you need, isn't it?" he says.
The office sits above his son Timothy's store Postcard Teas, where you can drink exotic brews, and mail a postcard on the back of a bag of tea leaves. How does Timothy, who's married, feel about losing most of his inheritance? "First, he's an extremely sweet person. Second, he's not interested in money. Third, he's a tea master," his father says.
D'Offay's work is far from done. Some US$10 million worth of gifts have been made towards the project, he says, including the US$4 million The Music From the Balconies (1984) by Ed Ruscha, now at Tate. Separately, Turner Prize winner Martin Creed has pledged a room of work.
D'Offay wants to make a room from Damien Hirst's medically themed Pharmacy installation, and has asked the artist for help. Hirst was his gallery assistant as he was leaving art college, and "would make us all laugh", d'Offay recalls.
The collector has just bought Hirst's Painkillers pill cabinet from a German dealer for 600,000 euros (HK$6.88 million). In a multi-item art swap with Hirst, he has traded, among others, a pair of graphic Koons works (picturing Koons naked with then-wife Ilona Staller) for a pair of newly made Hirsts, including Necromancer, a vitrine containing human fetuses.
D'Offay grew up in Leicester, northern England. He had an epiphany viewing the collections in the local museum, including a Francis Bacon "filled with beauty and dread", and wants to give children the same chance. "I was an unhappy, lonely, melancholy child, and I became interested in culture," he says.
When he was 17, his surgeon father "sort of ran away" to the Seychelles where he originated. Was he nobility? "We went to the place that he came from," jokes d'Offay. "It was three houses falling into a pond."
After art history studies at Edinburgh University, young d'Offay became an art dealer. Why not a curator? "I'm good at buying art before everybody else," he says. "I'm good at buying things which ultimately are important."
Marriage to Anne Seymour, then a Tate curator, turned the pair into tastemakers of the time. Their new gallery, opened in 1980, showed a slew of artists who had no London dealers back then: Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Beuys, Roy Lichtenstein.
D'Offay dealt with artists and museums, not collectors and journalists. Some critics branded him a "vampire" lurking in the gallery, "probably because I looked like death. One was in an almost permanent state of exhaustion."
He confirms reports of a fallout with Gilbert & George, who he represented. "They were feeling restless," he says. "We had very good and happy times together, and some bad times."
By contrast, d'Offay stayed close to Beuys, and spent the artist's last Christmas with him before he died in January 1986, aged 64. "He felt like a father to us."
A pink silkscreen of Beuys sits on the mantelpiece. It's by Warhol, one of the shyest people d'Offay ever knew. He says he persuaded the New York artist to do the late Fright Wig self-portraits. Warhol was about to deliver a portrait of author Samuel Beckett - "I'm going to paint an exhibition for you in really pretty colours," he said - when death got in the way.
In 2001, a week before the September 11 terrorist attacks, d'Offay shut his gallery. Any regrets? "Not the tiniest bit, for one second, ever," he says, raising his voice.
"The story was perfect as it was, I felt proud of what we'd done, and there was something else to do."
Britons all over the country are now getting the benefit of that "something else".
Bloomberg
