The temporary exhibition at the Taft Museum of Art through Oct. 1, Treasures of British Painting 1400-2000: The Berger Collection, provides a fascinating glimpse into one way that a museum — in this case, the Denver Art Museum — can build an important new collection in contemporary times. As such, it provides a striking contrast with the history of the Taft’s permanent collection.
Anna Sinton Taft and Charles Phelps Taft lived in the mansion that is now the Taft Museum from 1873 until their deaths in 1931 and 1929, respectively, bequeathing to Cincinnati the home and the 690 artworks they had amassed between 1902 and 1927. It opened to the public in 1932.
Collecting at their considered pace, and in their era, allowed them to slowly acquire choice examples of art, including works of British or British-related art by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, John Singer Sargent and J.M.W. Turner.
For William and Bernadette Berger, the approach was different. Their collection of some 300 British artworks primarily was built in just three years — the effort was tragically cut short when William Berger died in 1999. (She died in 2015.)
As a successful financier with considerable enthusiasm and resources, he wanted to quickly build a large museum-worthy collection. And he wanted the Denver Art Museum — he was a Denver native — to be a partner in the development of that collection. That museum today hosts and sometimes travels the collection, which is owned by the Berger Collection Educational Trust.
“Bill was a fascinating guy,” says Lewis Sharp, who was the Denver Art Museum’s director in the 1990s. He is now retired and spoke to CityBeat by phone. “With his success in the business world, he decided to build a collection of British painting. It was really motivated by his belief in the values that England brought to the world and contributed to democracy. He really thought building a collection could represent those values. And when Bill got started on something, he was a missile. He took off.”
The show at the Taft features 50 of the Berger Collection’s works. The exhibition has been thoughtfully chosen and designed so that the art provides a historical survey into the development of painting in Great Britain, even when a particular artist is not well known to the public at large. It’s also good at explaining how and why painters from other countries came to England to work.
There are well known names in the show — Gainsborough, Sargent, John Constable, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and others. And there are some engrossing surprises — a British artist’s portrait of a young Henry VIII from about 1513 and in its original frame, for instance.
Timothy Standring, a longtime Denver Art Museum curator whose current position is Gates Foundation Curator of Painting and Sculpture, worked with the Bergers closely in the 1990s. Sharp said, for instance, Standring especially helped bring some 20th- century paintings into the collection, such as Howard Hodgkin’s forcefully abstract 1996 “Storm” and Sir Claude Francis Barry’s gorgeously Pointillist “Victory Celebration” from 1919.
By email from Italy, Standring — also a trustee of the Berger Collection Educational Trust — shared observations. He said, in part, “It was interesting to see how fast they learned not only about the artists of works they collected, but — coming from the world of managing stock portfolios for the Berger Funds — also about their understanding of the art market. But this was not unexpected since they assembled collections of objects not unlike portfolios of stocks. While they were keen to acquire works that were thought of as out of fashion and hence undervalued, I often told them to stick to ‘blue chips.’ Or, following the basic rule of real estate: location, location, location.
“As one learned playing Monopoly, I urged them to ‘Buy Park Place instead of Baltic (Avenue),’ ” Standring wrote. “They started with Baltic and ended up scoring with some prize examples of Park Place. And, as a result of their brief collecting sprint, their legacy is the collection of work now shared with the broader public of Cincinnati at the Taft Museum of Art.”
CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosen@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 5, 2017.