Billionaire gives artful thanks

Josie Robertson with her Pablo Picasso painting. Picture / Richard Robinson

Billionaire Julian Robertson may have enough wealth to stay on Forbes' annual list of the 400 richest Americans over the past decade but 15 years ago the owner of the Kauri Cliffs lodge and golf course in Northland discovered something priceless: art.

He bought one piece for a "steal" - a 1942 landscape by French artist Pierre Bonnard - and since then the former investment banker and fund manager has been hooked on collecting art.

Visitors to Auckland Art Gallery's Lower Wellesley Wing can see for themselves that very same Bonnard in a collection of 14 paintings from the Robertson home in New York. The paintings are on loan for a month before being displayed at Te Papa and then being returned to New York.

The collection includes works by some of the European greats from 1845-1950, including a large Gray Vase and Palette by George Braque; a 1905 landscape called The Road (the Old Wall) by Paul Cezanne; a simple 1875 Vase of Roses by Henri Fantin-Latour, which normally resides in the Robertson bedroom; Four Rose Windows with Blue Motifs by Henri Matisse; Woman in a Hairnet, by Pablo Picasso, and the Bonnard Landscape with Red House.

For security and insurance reasons, it is not the custom of public galleries or owners to comment on the value of art works, but sources in Auckland valuation circles estimate the Picasso would easily fetch $10 million at auction.

Other works in the collection are possibly of equal, or greater value.

This is the first time Robertson and his wife Josie - who spend three months of each year living at Kauri Cliffs, and who have visited New Zealand regularly since the late 1970s - have loaned items from their collection on such a scale.

The idea arose after a visit to their New York home by Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines.

"Chris had looked at the paintings in our home and asked me if we had ever given such a group out on loan at one time," says Josie Robertson, who spent yesterday afternoon visiting the gallery.

"The answer was no. We have loaned out one or two at a time but never like this.

"Now our apartment is naked. But this is such an opportunity because we are gone from New York until March ... we will take them back after they have been to Te Papa."

Julian Robertson, who was to have visited the gallery yesterday to view the collection in their new home, was unable to travel because he is recovering from an operation.

But he said the Wellesley Wing was the perfect home for the paintings, "and I almost worry for them when they have to come back home and leave the beautiful gallery and come back home to New York".

The loan was a small gift from the Robertsons to New Zealanders, he said.

"We love this place and are glad to be able to reciprocate a little for all the beautiful views and mountains and oceans we've seen since we've been here."

Josie Robertson, who majored in fine art at the University of Texas, said the couple had never had time to collect at an earlier stage because her husband had been too immersed in business. "He had never had an art history class at high school or university ... we never started until Julian had the time to think about it.

"He educated himself by going to galleries and the auctions and studying the catalogues.

"He was buying not what he thought you would call an investment but the art he liked for the right price."

Now, she says with a laugh, she is the one "putting the stops on Julian".

"He wants to keep buying but we really don't have any wall space left. I don't want to put art in storage - lots of people do and that is tragic.

"But now Julian is getting more and more interested in contemporary art. If we were to build a house, he would have a ball."


$10 Million artwork

* Woman in a Hairnet is a Pablo Picasso portrait of his mistress Dora Maar.
* It was painted in 1938, at the same time he was in a relationship with Marie-Therese Walter, the mother of his son.
* The story goes that the suspicious Walter often visited the studio when Picasso was painting Maar, culminating in a physical fight between the two women - to Picasso's amusement.