Like many people, Paul G. Allen loved art as a kid. He drew rockets and robots and messed around with watercolors and oil paint. His mom kept every scrap of his drawings, bundled him off to museums, and filled their Seattle home with paintings by local artists.
So it's not surprising that once he could afford it Allen started buying art himself. It's just that as the co-founder of Microsoft, with an estimated $18 billion fortune, he can afford the kind of pictures most people only dream of — or encounter in museums.
Allen's first big purchase was an almost abstract Claude Monet image of waterlilies adrift in the mirror-like pond of his garden at Giverny west of Paris. It was painted in 1919 when the artist was already at work on a magnificent suite of waterlilies that he gave to France to celebrate peace at the end of World War I.
More than 6 feet wide, that Monet is a centerpiece of "Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection," opening Sunday at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The show will travel to New Orleans and Seattle after its Minnesota run ends Sept. 18.
Organized by the Portland and Seattle art museums, the exhibit features 39 pictures by a galaxy of Euro-American art stars spanning 400 years, from Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-78) to April Gornik (born 1953). Featured talents range from Canaletto to J.M.W. Turner, Cézanne, Signac, Klimt, Magritte, Hockney and Gerhard Richter. Among the Americans are significant paintings by Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran, Maxfield Parrish, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ed Ruscha and that uber-cosmopolitan, John Singer Sargent.
Life and art
Art is just one of many enthusiasms for a guy who owns a 414-foot-long yacht, two pro sports teams — the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers — and a bouquet of namesake institutes for scientific studies of the brain, artificial intelligence, "cell science" and a new "Frontiers Group" to which he lobbed $100 million in March for bioscience research. On the culture front, Allen founded Seattle's Experience Music Project Museum, launched the Seattle Art Fair and collects (and plays) electric guitars — including the legendary Fender Stratocaster that Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock. Busy guy.
But it's the range and variety of his art collection that dazzled Rachel McGarry, the Art Institute's associate curator who oversaw installation of "Seeing Nature" in Minneapolis. While the institute proudly boasts of four Monet paintings in its collection, McGarry marveled that Allen is lending five from his.
Arrayed by the waterlily picture, they span 38 years in the artist's career, from a sun-drenched meadow dotted with wildflowers painted in 1881, to a beclouded fisherman's cottage overlooking the sea at Normandy the following year, an atmospheric violet-and-gold vista of London's Waterloo Bridge from 1904, and a Venetian palazzo dissolving into aqueous twilight in 1908.