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Collecting is an art unto itself, and finding success in it requires one to learn the ropes of the market ecosystem. To help you build a collection of your own, we suggest seven books that offer a primer on where to start, from a biography of one of the world’s finest dealers to an exposé of the art market’s upper echelons.
A version of this article appears in the 2022 edition of ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors issue, under the title “Seven books for the budding collector.”
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The Rise and Rise of the Private Art Museum
By Georgina Adam
Lund Humphries, 2022Since the start of the pandemic alone, major collectors (all of whom appear on ARTnews‘s annual Top 200 Collectors list) like François Pinault and He Jianfeng have opened private museums; Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Nicolas Berggruen, and Mera and Donald Rubell will inaugurate new ones in the years to come. It’s clear that this trend isn’t going to end any time soon, hence the carefully worded title of this slim, shrewd volume. Veteran journalist Georgina Adam aims to show here that private museums are more than just tax shelters—they’re increasingly important ways to support artists too.
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Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil
By William Middleton
Knopf, 2018
In the mid-20th century, the married collectors Dominique and John de Menil shook up the Texas art scene—and helped make Houston a destination for modern art, opening a museum devoted to their world-class holdings there in 1987. How they rose in stature is the subject of this thrilling biography, which, at nearly 800 pages, is a thorough investigation of their income streams and a close look at how they amassed major artworks by Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others. The book also charts how their collecting doubled as a form of activism.
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Duveen: A Life in Art
By Meryle Secrest
Knopf, 2004
Perhaps no dealer in the history of British art held quite as much sway as Joseph Duveen, who brokered some of the most famous art sales of the 20th century. One of them, in 1921, involved the sale of Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy to railroad tycoon Henry Huntington for today’s equivalent of around $10 million. Meryle Secrest’s biography relates how the dealer amassed a Rolodex of the era’s leading American collectors (including Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon)—and how Duveen’s deep connections across the pond paved the way for masterpieces to leave Europe for good.
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The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France
By James McAuley
Yale University Press, 2021
Some may not think of collecting as inherently political, but Jews in France during World War II had no choice but to view owning art that way. At the time, the Nazis attempted to position their collections of Jewish families like the Rothschilds and the Ephrussis as akin to cultural theft, and those in power sought to seize their holdings of Impressionist and modern masterpieces. James McAuley, an expert in French history, considers how this little-explored notion is key to understanding how the Nazis asserted power during the era.
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American Art: Collecting and Connoisseurship
Edited by Stephen M. Sessler
Merrell, 2020
Let’s say you want to put together a collection of art made in the U.S. throughout the centuries. Where might you begin? Stephen M. Sessler, a collector in his own right, used that question to guide this book, which is intended to offer a brief history of American art, along with insights into the market for it. Find some of those insights in art historian Tiffany Elena Washington’s essay on the revival of unsung figures—many of them neither male nor white—and learn what recent retrospectives have done for their markets.
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Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art
By Michael Shnayerson
Public Affairs, 2019
As journalist Michael Shnayerson reminds us in Boom, it is almost too easy to take for granted the current art market system in which a wealthy few regularly conduct multimillion-dollar deals. It wasn’t always that way; the trend is fairly recent. The opaque network that dealers Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner, Iwan Wirth, and other figures cultivate can be hard for nascent collectors to infiltrate, so consider this book a primer of sorts for the current market—and a possible way in.
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The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
By Don Thompson
Yale University Press, 2021
This book’s titular beast is suspended in formaldehyde, and decaying. Nevertheless, this sculpture by Damien Hirst was bought by businessman and Top 200 Collector Steven A. Cohen for nearly $12 million back in 2006. Here is economist Don Thompson’s attempt to understand the all-too-obscure science of matching artworks with price tags, with an eye to all the art-world hullabaloo that informs what a collector may be willing to pay.