George Lindemann Journal "Melva Bucksbaum on What Artists She's Collecting Now" @wsj by Kelly Crow
Melva Bucksbaum Keith Bedford for The Wall Street Journal
Growing up in Washington, D.C., in the early 1940s, Connecticut collector Melva Bucksbaum used to leave her Russian immigrant parents' grocery store and slip a nickel in the downtown-bound bus, so she could spend hours ambling through the National Gallery. "I wanted to be an artist," she said.
By the time she was married and studying art in Des Moines, Iowa, Ms. Bucksbaum said she realized that her peers were better than she. She put away her palette and started buying art instead. Since then, she has collected everything from Peter Paul Rubens to the Impressionists to James Rosenquist. Today, she and her second husband, former commodities trader Raymond J. Learsy, are best known for collecting contemporary art.
As vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Ms. Bucksbaum has also gained a reputation for the Bucksbaum Award, a $100,000 prize given every other year to one artist included in the Whitney Biennial. The latest winner is Zoe Leonard. The New York artist's biennial work, "945 Madison Avenue," transformed a 1,200-square-foot room of the museum into an oversize camera obscura with help from a lens placed in the space's lone window. The result is a real-time wonder-scape, an upside-down view of the buildings and people across the street projected onto the room's otherwise empty walls.
'945 Madison Avenue' by Bucksbaum Award winner Zoe Leonard Zoe Leonard/Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Murray Guy, NY/Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan.
Ms. Leonard, in an interview Wednesday, said the "life-changer" prize will let her explore a new body of work.
Ms. Bucksbaum said she has no say in picking prizewinners—alums include Mark Bradford and Omer Fast—but she's well known for championing female artists. With the Whitney Biennial set to close May 25, she agreed to discuss the latest additions to her collection.
Below, an edited transcript:
"Ray and I married in 2001, and it took me a year to get into his mind-set and appreciate emerging and contemporary art. When you're collecting younger artists, you have to do a lot of footwork by going to galleries and museums. Sometimes I like things that are maybe a little bit too cute and fanciful, but I'm learning to move away from pretty. We were just in São Paulo, and I bought two things, and one of them probably doesn't fit into our collection, but I'll keep it around. You make mistakes, you learn. You just keep going.
I'll never forget walking through the Whitney Biennial in 2008 and seeing Mika Rottenberg's 'Cheese.' It's sensational. 'Cheese' is based on the Sutherland sisters, this family involved with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, and they all had very long hair. Mika built this wooden shack and embedded videos all over it that show women washing their long hair, drying their hair and living in a rural area with goats and chickens. Here in Connecticut, we're in nature—it makes me want to keep goats in the yard. Or Lalanne sheep ( a favorite subject of sculptor François-Xavier Lalanne).
One of the great pieces we got in the last two years is 'The Hunting Party' by Rosa Loy and Neo Rauch —she did one-half of the painting and he did the other, and it's just absolutely wonderful. They're both from Leipzig, Germany, and they both paint haunting and spooky scenes of people or industrial buildings. You sense something strange is going on in their paintings, but you can't tell immediately. You have to study them for a long time. In ours, you see these rabbits with big, beautiful eyes, and it makes you wonder what those rabbits are thinking.
We're always adding pieces by Laurie Simmons to the collection, lately from her 'Love Dolls' series. They're magical. I started buying her photos 14 years ago, and we have the whole set from her 'The Instant Decorator' series. They look like 1950s and '60s magazine spreads—you think they're from Better Homes & Gardens—only she's superimposed other people in them. Her "Love Dolls" series explores this phenomenon where men buy life-size dolls that they treat like girlfriends. They're quite expensive, and you can order them by saying what hip size and waist size you want, but when you look at Laurie's photographs, you don't think they're even dolls. They look real."