The Accidental Collector
Herbert Lust
“Put all your eggs in one basket. Study, study, study. Learn the markets. Go to the galleries. Learn the prices. And whatever artists or artists you love, buy the top quality. If you’re really looking for investment, buy the trophy piece, you know?” — Herbert Lust
During the second half of the Twentieth Century, Herbert Lust (b. 1926), a self-described “farm boy from Indiana”, amassed one of the greatest collections of contemporary art of his generation, numbering well in excess of 1000 works, installed throughout his Connecticut home and Manhattan pied-à-terre. Not only a great patron and supporter of the arts, during the course of an extraordinary life Lust has counted Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Alexander Calder (1998-1976) and Robert Indiana (1928-2018) as close friends and personal confidants. “I think that all life is an accident, I just feel I’ve been lucky,” Lust attests. “And I don’t feel proud of anything I’ve done, maybe to a fault.” Born in Chicago, his family were of opposite social backgrounds; his father, a graduate of Yale Law School, was from a wealthy Jewish family, old-stock settlers who arrived before the Civil War, whereas his mother was working class — the daughter of a manual laborer (the two met when his mother was hired to work as one of his father’s five secretaries). Spurred on by an idyllic pastoral fantasy of his children growing up in the countryside, Lust’s father soon moved the family to a farm in central Indiana, where he bred and showed dogs. “We were the only Jews in the area,” Lust recalls. “They hated Jews there, but since my father was rich and famous, they forgave him his origins.” Things changed when in 1936 Lust’s father was killed in an automobile accident, leaving his mother with three children: Lust, then 9, and two younger sisters. The family’s fortunes soon dried up and they moved to a small apartment in a poor neighborhood, where his mother worked as a saleswoman in a department store so as to make ends meet. A turning point in Lust’s life came in 1944 when he attended officer’s training and embarked on a literature course where he came to read the work of John Keats. “I read the poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and something just devastated me – ‘What? Beauty is important? ... I couldn’t stop reading ... and my whole life was changed. I never looked back.”
Herbert Lust in Paris
Herbert Lust with a Giacometti sculpture
Quite literally from that first moment, Lust developed a voracious appetite for literature and dedicated himself entirely to learning. Three years later he would become the youngest person ever to receive a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago in mathematics and philosophy, and from there he was awarded the university’s first Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. It was in la Ville-Lumière that Lust became swept up in the vibrant artistic community around Montmartre; indeed early on, he found himself at what he describes as “a regal luncheon” thrown by his philosophy professor, Jean Wahl, where, by chance, he was seated next to the great surrealist artist Alberto Giacometti. “And here I am, I had no respect for art at all, I thought it was bullshit. It was decoration,” says Lust. Giacometti was arguing with someone about André Breton (1896-1966) and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). His opponent was claiming Sartre was wrong in attacking Breton for being either a fool or dishonest. During a lull in conversation, Giacometti turned to Lust and said, “I can’t place your accent, where are you from?” Lust, who at the time, was very much enamored by great writers and literary characters, decided to adopt the strategy of Julian Sorel, the hero of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and made up a “cock-and-bull story” about being a Romanian Jew who had escaped the Russians by walking barefoot across the Carpathian Mountains. When the luncheon ended, Giacometti invited him to visit his studio on the Rue Hippolyte-Maindron, a somewhat ramshackle atelier in a poor and rundown part of town. “I looked at this stuff, ‘This is art?’ I thought it was awful. But then the scholarship began to work and I realized, if Sartre and people like that said [Giacometti] was the greatest living artist, there was something wrong with me,” says Lust. “And then I began realizing [the art] was very beautiful, and then I realized that [Giacometti] was a very great man.” Lust and Giacometti would remain close friends until the artist’s death in 1966, and over those ensuing decades, Lust became a connoisseur and collector of Giacometti’s work (his first acquisitions were four prints for $7 and one drawing for $20, which was equal to his monthly food budget at the time). Indeed so close was their bond that around his neck Lust wears a medallion that Giacometti designed for Italian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973). “She asked him to do buttons for a coat, but when she put them on the coat, they were too heavy. That’s how I got it,” says Lust.
The artist Robert Indiana at work in his studio
Despite a refusal to work mornings, in 1957 Lust traded a career as an avant-garde writer and literature professor at the University of Chicago for one in investment banking: “I never go anywhere in the morning. I read and I write. I lost some excellent business opportunities because I did what I wanted, but apparently I was talented enough to make money between noon and six.” Inspired in part by the novelist Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) (his literary idol, and a leading figure of pre World-War I Paris art circles), and in part by his his friendships with other artists, Lust began collecting seriously. His first major acquisitions were a painting by Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) and a series of drawings by the German surrealist and photographer Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). “What I really wanted was a Magritte painting,” explains Lust. “But you could get 50 great Bellmers for one great Magritte. And art collecting is no different than buying a property. It’s shopping. You want to get the best bang for your buck.” In 1973 Lust met American Pop Art impresario Robert Indiana (arguably the first Pop Artist and the first to go into the Museum of Modern Art, two years before both Lichtenstein (1923-1997) and Warhol (1928-1987)) and, as with Giacometti, their meeting was purely a stroke of luck.
Lust’s friend, a chef, was hired to cater a party thrown by a member of the Manhattan beau monde — a du Pont — and Lust was invited to attend. Upon arrival he was greeted at the door by a curious Mme. du Pont who told him there was a “fellow Hoosier” keen to meet him. Lust was taken aback. “I was at this gorgeous penthouse on 5th Avenue ... I thought I was traveling on the moon. Who cares about a Hoosier?” The Hoosier in question was Indiana, who immediately insulted Lust, calling him stupid, and questioning why he didn’t have an American in his collection. “Why do you only have Europeans?” I said: “Well, I do have one. He’s really great. He’s Calder.” “Calder’s nothing. He’s just a follower of Miró in Surrealism. He’s not really an American,” Indiana replied. After a rocky start the pair immediately hit it off, bonding over their shared home state and talking for hours away from other guests — though as it would turn out, it took considerably longer for Lust to come around to Indiana’s particular brand of politically driven Pop. “At first I said, ‘This is absurd, these words, LOVE and HUG, this is bullshit. And little by little it grew on me.” Later in life when Indiana fell on hard times, Lust supported him by buying up all his work — and in doing so, gradually, he amassed the greatest collection of Indiana works in the world. Lust says of FOUR (1965), one of 30 Indianas he owns: “Indiana was trying to think of one word that would define him as a human” and could only come up with an unprintable four-letter word. This painting became a kind of self-portrait in disguise.
The artist Robert Indiana and Herbert Lust posing in the latters Connecticut home
In today’s art market, collecting is mediated by a plethora of intermediaries — in the form of advisers, dealers, curators, art fairs and auction houses. As a result of this overly contrived commerciality it’s unlikely a student such as Lust would ever meet one of the great master artists by mere happenstance. Yet, it was as result of this first chance meeting that Lust went on to develop a deeply personal and diverse collection, by the likes of Joel-Peter Witkin (b. 1939), Michal Rovner (b. 1957), Shusaku Arakawa (1936-2010) and Mary Bauermeister (b. 1934), all of whom he befriended before collecting their work. “Alberto [Giacometti] gave me an introduction to Calder and I met him with [Mark] Rothko on a boat coming back from Paris in 1961,” recounts Lust. He went on to buy a number of major works by Calder, including jewellery for his late wife, Virginia, but not Rothko, whose work he found depressing (something he now describes as a “big mistake”, given the artist’s commercial worth). Indeed what hasn’t changed in the last fifty years is the proclivity of great art to appreciate wildly in value, something Lust analyzed in his 1969 book A Dozen Principles for Art Investment — essentially foreshadowing the current trend for using art as a financial instrument. “[My] collection has often been called the most eclectic in history ... It’s a mystery why I go in so many different directions, but I chalk it up to one word: love. Always buy what you love.” Lust is possibly the only collector to have written catalogue raisonnés on artists (both Giacometti and Enrico Baj (1924-2003)), which only serves to illustrate his sincere and personal passion for art — indeed he truly embodies the modern Renaissance man.