The George Lindemann Journal
So you want to be the next Peggy Guggenheim. Besides wealth, what does it take to qualify as a heavyweight art collector today? Kelly Crow has answers on Lunch Break. Photo: André Klotz for The Wall Street Journal.
Last year, Brazilian collector Pedro Barbosa spotted a tumbling spiral made with hundreds of rubber tires at the Swiss fair Art Basel. The next day, Mr. Barbosa told a collector friend, Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas, that he intended to buy the tires, actually a $150,000 installation by British artist Mike Nelson.
Surprised, Mr. Augusto reminded Mr. Barbosa that the artwork wouldn't fit inside Mr. Barbosa's São Paulo home. "Doesn't matter," Mr. Barbosa said. "I bet I can lend it to some museum in America." (For now, he is storing the work with a dealer in Italy).
It takes great wealth—and a little hubris—to ascend the ranks of the world's top art collectors. Mr. Barbosa, a 48-year-old former bond trader, is determined to qualify. Like many collectors of his generation, he began buying art on a whim just over a decade ago, but his pursuit has steadily grown serious. By collecting younger, hard-to-get Brazilian artists like Paulo Nazareth along with global superstars like Olafur Eliasson, he has earned a reputation as a highflying tastemaker on the international art scene. Mr. Barbosa employs a personal curator, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, to manage his collection and allows guest curators to organize shows inside his spacious home in São Paulo's prestigious Jardins neighborhood. He also keeps an apartment around the corner where favored artists like Amalia Pica can stay to make and show their work. Friends say he is ever on the move, traveling to far-flung biennials and fairs from London to Istanbul to the United Arab Emirates. Altogether, his 500-piece collection amounts to roughly half his net worth, he said.
Mr. Barbosa is part of an emerging class of collectors springing up from all corners of the globe who are transforming the art marketplace with their willingness to splurge on art that suits their own tastes—not only the canons of New York or London. From Beijing to Bogotá, new art hubs are thriving in large part because these up-and-comers continue to amass art—in good economic times and bad. Many are investing heavily in contemporary art, the most speculative end of the spectrum, and changing the way the market functions.
Pedro Barbosa's Art Collection
Pedro Barbosa has earned a reputation as a high-flying tastemaker on the international art scene by collecting younger, hard-to-get Brazilian artists like Jonathas de Andrade, shown here. This piece is titled 'Education for Adults' (2010). Jonathas de Andrade/Galeria Vermelho
A few generations ago, collectors like Henry Tate or Peggy Guggenheim needed aristocratic ties—or robber-baron-level fortunes—to ascend the ranks of the art world elite. Today, there are no rules for assembling a group of contemporary artworks that will one day prove iconic. Newcomer collectors say they pick up clues where they can. Some, like French investment banker Edouard Carmignac, have created art prizes to ferret out fresh discoveries—which they later showcase in their own art spaces. Others such as Roman entrepreneur Pierpaulo Barzan run foundations that mount traveling museum-style shows featuring artists they also happen to buy. Plenty more, like Costa Rican real-estate developer Judko Rosenstock, give pieces by hotshot artists to major museums like the Tate—moves that could bolster the cachet of his own pieces by those artists.
Mr. Barbosa's evolution is emblematic. Early on, he said he only collected artists from Brazil, but last year he decided to "go global," and he's been "going nuts" ever since—traveling to international fairs to collect artists like Germany's Wolfgang Tillmans and Lebanon's Rayyane Tabet. These additions serve to diversify his holdings, he said, but they also put his Brazilian pieces into a broader art context. To the same end, he also recently donated pieces by two young Brazilian artists, Jonathas de Andrade and Andre Komatsu, to London's Tate Modern.
It helps that his growing ambitions also coincide with his country's emergence as a global art hub. Until a few years ago, Brazil's art market was steady but relatively insular, anchored by South American collectors who were willing to pay as much as $50,000 for Lygia Clark's foldable aluminum sculptures or $15,000 for Beatriz Milhazes's flowery abstracts. But as Brazil's economy has expanded, local collectors have found themselves increasingly competing for their hometown favorites with buyers from around the globe—and prices have spiked as a result.
Even now as Brazil confronts higher inflation and signs of tapering growth, collectors keep bidding record sums for Brazilian modern and contemporary art. In May, Phillips in New York sold Ms. Clark's 1959 black-and white abstract, "Against Relief (Object No. 7)," for $2.2 million, the most ever paid for a work of Brazilian art.
The auction record still represents a fraction of what China's counterpart collectors have paid lately for their own masterpieces, so market-watchers say Brazilian art still has plenty of room to grow, price-wise.
All this attention is pointing a bigger spotlight on the handful of Brazilian contemporary collectors who have positioned themselves as regional kingmakers, such as Mr. Barbosa. "The galleries look at everything Pedro is buying," said Mr. Freitas, the collector who saw the tires with him in Basel.
One of Mr. Barbosa's latest moves is telling. In September, he invited a curator from London's nonprofit Chisenhale Gallery, Polly Staple, to visit Brazil. He helped pay for her stay, and one morning he picked her up from her hotel for a tour of a few nonprofit art spaces and galleries. He had borrowed his wife Patricia Moraes ' black SUV for the occasion: "Welcome to an armored, bulletproof car," he said, chuckling, as Ms. Staple climbed in.
First up was Pivô, a nonprofit art incubator that opened last year in a former dentist's office inside architect Oscar Niemayer's undulating Copan building in downtown São Paulo. Next, they stopped by Galeria Vermelho—vermelho means "red" in Portuguese—to see a group show with artists like Cildo Meireles exploring issues of crime. The gallery had been robbed the week before, but the thief only took a CD player, so Vermelho didn't press charges. "The guy didn't think to steal the art," said dealer Akio Aoki.
An untitled work by Francesca Woodman Francesca Woodman/Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo
Mr. Barbosa also took Ms. Staple to meet Jaqueline Martins, a new dealer who specializes in selling São Paulo artists from the 1970s who have since been "overlooked" by the market, Mr. Barbosa said. Ms. Martins' roster includes Genilson Soares, a conceptual artist in his 70s who was once hailed for making large geometric installations often employing colored lighting and optical illusions. A few weeks after Mr. Barbosa's guided tour with Ms. Staple, Ms. Martins displayed one of Mr. Soares's oversize triangle works from 1973 at London's Frieze Art Fair—even though it wasn't technically for sale. "I bought that a month ago," Mr. Barbosa said. (He paid around $20,000.)
In São Paulo, Mr. Barbosa is well known for scouting Brazilian art schools and often buys pieces from promising students—a collecting tactic that's commonplace in New York but still relatively rare in São Paulo, dealers say. Local gallery Mendes Wood DM recently signed up one of his latest discoveries, sculptor Michael Dean. When Mr. Barbosa created an artist residency, one of the first artists he invited was Ms. Pica, another early find who just had her first U.S. solo museum show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Next up: New Yorkers Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss.
Mr. Barbosa doesn't move through art circles with the panache of some of his countrymen, though. He is a millionaire, but he can't spend apace with Brazil's best-known collector, Bernardo Paz, a billionaire mining magnate from the Belo Horizonte region who reportedly spends $60 million a year commissioning and installing artworks throughout his vast jungle compound called Inhotim. Mr. Barbosa said he usually spends between $8,000 and $250,000 apiece on his art purchases. Still, he has found other ways to stand out.
A few weeks ago, Mr. Barbosa attended the opening party for the Mercosul Biennial in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. The event was held at the hilltop mansion of the biennial's president Patricia Fossati Druck, with partygoers like steel titan Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter dressed in designer suits. By contrast, Mr. Barbosa showed up wearing bluejeans, a baby-blue gingham shirt and Pac-Man cuff links. Shunning the glowing swimming pool and bar set up nearby to serve Brazil's favorite sugary cocktail, the caipirinha, Mr. Barbosa spent the night huddled on the lawn with artists like Mario Garcia Torres and Inhotim director Eungie Joo.
Ms. Joo mentioned her favorite piece in the biennial was a rusty landscape installation by Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle —at which point Mr. Barbosa leaned toward her and whispered, "I might have the best collection of Cinthia's work." Ms. Joo's eyes widened, and she grinned her approval.
Half of São Paulo's 40-odd contemporary-art galleries are less than five years old. Mr. Barbosa knows the strengths and weaknesses of their rosters better than anyone, said Buenos Aires collector Mauro Herlitzka. This market intelligence gives Mr. Barbosa's collection a competitive edge. But as Mr. Barbosa's collection takes in more artworks from beyond Brazil, his ancillary costs have also mounted. Because of Brazil's punishing import-tax laws, he must pay up to 50% above a foreign artwork's sale price just to bring it into his country—a markup he may not be able to recoup unless the art's value appreciates significantly over time. Dealers say some Brazilian collectors have found ways to avoid these import taxes by buying and storing pieces abroad or smuggling them into their luggage. Mr. Barbosa said he buys from the local SP-Arte fair, where taxes are typically discounted by the government. He said he also has proof he has paid the appropriate fees for everything displayed in his house.
Mr. Barbosa and his wife Patricia, who is head of investment banking for JP Morgan in Brazil, and their two children live in a cream-colored, two-story house on a leafy block in the wealthy São Paulo district of Jardins. Throughout their home, they have arranged a mix of sleek, geometric pieces by contemporary classics like Sérgio de Camargo and Jesús Rafael Soto alongside newer sculptures made from ordinary materials like hair curlers. In their backyard, a pair of conjoined shopping carts by Marcelo Cidade stands sentry beside the pool. On a bench in their living room sits a row of handbags that were dipped in concrete like candlesticks by Mr. Tabet, the artist from Lebanon. Even the walls of the children's bedrooms have been commandeered for art: "Sometimes my son complains, but I run a dictatorship," Mr. Barbosa said, grinning.
His own introduction to art was considerably less in-your-face. His father was a high-school gym teacher who only wanted his three children to get a solid education, which they did. Mr. Barbosa's first cousin was a major art dealer, Raquel Arnaud, but he said he rarely hung out in her gallery growing up—he preferred to hang out in nearby Ibirapuera Park and sell ballpoint pens to his friends for a profit. (He stuffed the clear pen cases with shredded currency to add cachet.) After he married in 1999 and settled into a life as a banker specializing in emerging markets and depressed bonds, he started buying art.
His first piece was a $20,000 Soto that he bought from his cousin, but he later switched to buying cheaper pieces by younger living artists, and he's largely stuck to that pattern ever since. When he finds an artist with potential, he tells them he likes to buy several works at a time, but he warns them he will likely stop collecting their work after they turn 40. He said he does this because it compels him to keep seeking fresh talent rather than pay ever-higher premiums for examples by artists he already owns.
Increasingly, Mr. Barbosa is looking farther afield for his art. The shift started in 2008 when he went to Frieze in London for the first time and marveled at how few collectors had turned up in the wake of the Lehman Bros. closure weeks earlier. Walking around the fair's vacant aisles, he realized he could ask galleries for steep discounts if he was willing to broaden the scope of his collection beyond Brazil. He took home pieces by Mr. Eliasson and Tomas Saraceno.
Last year, he ratcheted things up again by hiring his curator, Mr. Visconti, who has planned Brazil's pavilion for the Venice Biennale. Besides paying Mr. Visconti an undisclosed monthly retainer, Mr. Barbosa pays him to travel and inform him about artists to consider. The pair now invites young curators to mount shows of Mr. Barbosa's collection.
In a few more years, the plan is to publish a book about these shows—yet another way Mr. Barbosa hopes to lend lasting credibility to his collection. It's a tactic museums have been using for years, after all. "I don't want to spend too much on the parts," he said. "I'm more interested in the whole."
Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com