American billionaire, hedge-fund guru and philanthropist Julian Robertson, who died earlier this week aged 90, has left a collection of masterpieces, thought to be worth well over $200 million, to the Auckland Art Gallery. Jane Phare reports on a complex man who considered himself to be half Kiwi.
Julian Robertson was worth $7.73 billion, according to Forbes, but he didn't live the ritzy, glitzy life of a billionaire. Ibiza, superyachts and designer clothing weren't his thing - although he did have a private jet and two luxury golf courses in New Zealand.
He loved his golf, even if he apparently wasn't blessed with much natural talent for the game. He loved his family – late wife Josie, his three sons and nine grandchildren. He loved winning, making money and beating Wall Street at its own game, he loved New Zealand and he loved art.
Back in 2009, it was those last two loves that made him pledge 15 European masterpieces, then valued at $115 million, to the Auckland Art Gallery.
Robertson wasn't initially drawn to art, particularly the modernist Cubist paintings he didn't understand or particularly like. It was Josie, who majored in art at the University of Texas, who persuaded her stubborn and sometimes curmudgeonly husband to take notice, to look and appreciate.
And he did, growing to love the art as much as his wife did.
The Robertsons filled the walls of their New York apartment with priceless art and when those walls filled up, brought pieces to New Zealand on their jet to hang on the walls of their golf resorts: Kauri Cliffs in Northland, Cape Kidnappers in Hawke's Bay, and Matakauri Lodge in Queenstown.
Auckland Art Gallery director Kirsten Lacy saw some of the bequested paintings during a visit to Robertson in New York in late 2019 soon after she joined the gallery. Josie had died nine years earlier after a battle with breast cancer.
"The collection was hung floor to ceiling right up to the end of his life. My sense was, when I was with him, [that] they reminded him of his wife Josie. I felt they were a real reminder of her and brought her into the room for him," Lacy says.
"She opened a whole new world of what turned out to be a lifelong pleasure for him."
Now art lovers and members of the public will have permanent access to those 15 works, dated between 1875 and 1951 that include masterpieces by Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Salvador Dali, Georges Braque, Andre Derain, Fernand Leger, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Fantin-Latour. The donation includes a set of 20 colourful cut-out collages from Matisse's Jazz series of plates known as pochoirs.
The collection's value has soared in the past 13 years with art experts putting the current value at well over $200m, making the bequest the most significant donation to the art world in both New Zealand and Australia.
Webb's director of art Charles Ninow says the overall value had risen significantly since the Robertson collection was first promised. A Pablo Picasso Cubist portrait of the artist's French mistress Dora Maar, similar to Femme a la resille (1938) in the Robertson collection, sold for $34m earlier this year.
Paintings by Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse and Salvador Dali have also achieved prices over $16m in the past 12 months, Ninow says.
"The Robertsons collected the best of the best. For paintings like these, the only direction is up. Considering that, it is a very, very generous gift."
The paintings have already been viewed in past exhibitions, the last one in 2011. But it may be some time before the New Zealand public will be able to see the collection. Most of the artwork is still in New York and, once it arrives in New Zealand, will need to be assessed for insurance purposes. Despite the collection's value, Lacy does not anticipate needing additional security for the collection.
"The security of the gallery always has to protect all works so I can't see any issues there."
However the gallery may consider glazing some of the paintings to ensure the surfaces can't be damaged by a knock.
The collection will eventually be on permanent display but where that will be in the gallery space has yet to be decided. Some of the gallery's older exhibition rooms will be shut while the gallery roof is repaired, Lacy says, and it could be another year before the works are ready for viewing.
She anticipates the collection will draw visitors to Auckland but also acknowledges that Kiwis in other parts of the country will want to have a chance to see the works. After the collection has been displayed in Auckland for at least 18 months, gallery management will consider how to tour the collection in conjunction with other galleries.
The scale of the gift is unparalleled in Australia or New Zealand, Lacy says. New Zealand does not have a cultural gift programme that provides any incentive for giving valuable assets of this value.
"Whereas if he [Robertson] had given it to an American institution there would be."
Without tax incentives, the gift of the art collection is "pure philanthropy". That level of generosity was not unusual for Robertson who gave away an estimated $2 billion over his lifetime.
In New Zealand he set up the Aotearoa Foundation adding to other charitable entities including the Robertson Foundation and the Tiger Foundation, supporting the environment, education and the disadvantaged. He gave $5m to the Christchurch earthquake appeal, and made major donations to Emirates Team New Zealand and the University of Auckland.
Josie and Julian Robertson's connection with New Zealand goes back to 1979 during their first visit. Stunned by the landscape, and the contrast to New York, they eventually bought land in the 1990s, a farm that would become Kauri Cliffs, and later developed Cape Kidnappers.
Eventually they spent four months a year here, building three identical four-bedroom villas at Kauri Cliffs for each of their three sons and their families. In 2009, the same year he pledged the art collection, Robertson become New Zealand's first honorary knight companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business and philanthropy.
He was keen to invest in young, intelligent minds and, to that end, funded New Zealand students to attend Duke University in North Carolina every year under the Robertson Scholarship.
After hearing of the tycoon's death, Kiwi entrepreneur Jamie Beaton described Robertson as a "cherished mentor" who took him under his wing when he was 19 and changed his entire world.
"He made the foreign land of America feel like a second home and showed me the ropes," Beaton told the Herald.
Robertson was one of Beaton's earliest, and biggest, backers. The young New Zealander was first employed as an analyst by Robertson's Tiger Management, then in 2015 Julian, along with his son Alex and Tiger executive and fellow billionaire Chase Coleman, tipped more than $16m into Beaton's nascent Crimson Education.
According to Companies office filings at the time of his death Robertson remained the second largest individual shareholder in Crimson, behind only Beaton, with the late billionaire holding a personal 17 per cent stake.
The billionaire in baggy shorts
I first met Julian Robertson in a private departure lounge at Auckland International Airport in 2008 shortly before he and Josie were about to leave for New York on their $20m Gulfstream V jet.
I was nervous. I had read about Robertson, once dubbed "the Wizard of Wall St" because of his phenomenal success in running his hedge fund firm, Tiger Management. He was known to be extremely competitive, at times fiery, a complex man who could be gruff and at times arrogant on the one hand, and extremely kind and charming on the other. I expected one of those don't-suffer-fools interviews.
But in fact he was polite, measured, thoughtful, speaking in the slow southern drawl of his native North Carolina where he was born and educated. He was 75 back then, and didn't look like a billionaire who was about to board his private jet. He was wearing a comfy jumper, his long, spindly legs sticking out of baggy shorts, and was unshaven.
At the time I cheekily wrote: "You could dismiss Julian Robertson as a dear old dad come to see a loved one off at the airport."
We walked across the tarmac to see inside the waiting Gulfstream. From memory it was surprisingly ordinary. It had comfy cream leather seats but they looked well used, creases earned over thousands of air miles. Robertson probably didn't think it necessary to have the latest swanky model.
Waiting in the lounge were two excited young Kiwi Robertson scholars, Amir Malek, of Hamilton, and Oliver Wilson, of Dunedin who were joining the flight. They would spend four years at Duke University - Malek studying physics and Wilson studying engineering.
I assume the Herald on Sunday sent me because of the students. Instead Robertson and I talked about politics. Helen Clark was in her third term as Prime Minister and there had been hoo-ha from the Labour Party about a major American donor, thought to be Robertson, funding the National Party to the tune of $500,000 for the 2005 election. In the end the donation, if it existed, wasn't a winning play. Clark squeaked in just ahead of Don Brash's National Party.
Later, it came out that Robertson had also donated $1000 to Te Tai Tokerau MP Dover Samuels towards his 1999 election campaign. Samuels confirmed the donation and said it was because he was friends with the couple.
We talked about Brash, a man whom Robertson described as "an exceptional human being" and a fellow disciple of American Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman.
He thought Helen Clark was "honest and smart as a whip". He told me he funded good people on their ability rather than politics or the party. But it was doubtful he would extend that funding to Clark, despite his donation to Samuels.
"Unfortunately, she's an honest unmitigated socialist and I don't think that that, in the long run, is the way to go. I mean let's face it, even the communists have become capitalists," he said at the time.
Robertson had watched fascinated as the ultra-conservative Brash pitted himself against Clark.
"Both of them were fabulous espousers of their causes."
But despite his admiration for Clark's mental capacity he couldn't come to terms with her politics.
"I'd give anything if she weren't a socialist. She's the worst kind because she's so effective," he said.
He talked about the beauty of New Zealand and his first investments, buying farm land near the Bay of Islands and in Hawke's Bay that would be transformed into two luxury golf resorts.
"You could get this real estate which was as pretty as any in the world for the price of a very modest New York apartment," he said.
While he might have got the land for a song, Robertson went on to pour millions of dollars into building guest lodges, establishing wetlands and planting natives. The two resorts were run by his middle son Jay (Julian Robertson III) while his other two sons lived in the US.
Smack in the middle of the global financial crisis (2008) the former Wizard of Wall St urged caution. He gave advice that he would probably give now.
"I think this is one of those times when you have to be awfully careful with your money and look for preservation of capital much more than making money."
He also thought Kiwis took too many holidays, "more vacations than anybody in the world".
While we chatted, an art consultant arrived at the airport with a Colin McCahon painting to show Josie. The painting had been in the McCahon family and had never before been offered for sale. But just then Robertson's PA told him discreetly that it was time for take-off.
"I don't want to leave," he said, "I've been playing some good golf."
I never did find out if the Robertsons bought the McCahon but I've since learned there is one hanging on the walls of Kauri Cliffs, so they might well have done so.
