Word: arts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some museums, however, have continued to make remarkable purchases. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, under the direction of Edmund Pillsbury, is a leader here (as New Yorkers can currently see from a loan show of its holdings at the Frick Collection). At least one museum, the Getty in Malibu, Calif., with its $3.5 billion endowment and almost limitless spending power, seems unaffected by the rise in price. In May it was able to buy Pontormo's Portrait of a Halberdier at Christie's for $35 million and last week Manet's acridly ironic view of a flag-bedecked...
...world. He had even figured out a way of selling nonalcoholic beer to Muslims in the Middle East. Everything about him was on a large scale -- his ambitions, his capacity for risk, his appetite for publicity. Also, he had some Australian paintings. But he did not own an art collection that would cut ice outside his home city of Perth...
Like many another entrepreneur, Bond had never given much thought to art until he got rich. "This Pie-casso, now," he asked an Australian museum man over dinner in Sydney in the early 1980s, "is he worth having?" But a major impressionist collection was what Bond hankered after. He knew this could not possibly come cheap. He didn't care. He was, in short, a dealer's dream: Billionaris ignorans, a species now almost extinct in the U.S. but preserved (along with other ancient life-forms) in the Antipodes...
Irises, it seemed at the time, was the picture that saved the art market after Black Monday -- Oct. 19, 1987 -- when Wall Street plunged 508 points. Actually, the market was running quite high between the crash and the sale of Irises, but the painting was greeted as a talisman. Bond beefed up the security arrangements on the top floor of his headquarters in Perth to fortress strength and unveiled his acquisition -- the only Van Gogh in Australia -- to the press. "This isn't just a great painting!" he exulted to the cameras. "It's the greatest painting in the world...
...art market was going like the Wabash Cannon Ball through 1988 and 1989, Bond's own finances were not. His bid for Irises had been part of a consistent pattern: paying far too much for investments even though they were, as assets, sound. In 1987 he paid more than $700 million for Kerry Packer's TV stations in Australia. In the financial year ending last June, Bond's media firm posted a $34 million loss. Also in 1987, Bond paid more than $1 billion for the U.S. brewery G. Heileman, whose 1989 resale value is about half that...