Richard Brown Baker: Gambling on Taste

“A great dealer creates collectors,” Richard Brown Baker wrote in 1962. “That is more fruitful than selling a picture.” Collector and diarist extraordinaire, Baker (1912-2002) was cultivated by several dealers after he moved to Manhattan in 1952, primed to become a serious buyer of art. By the mid-1950s he enjoyed close relationships with Samuel Kootz, Sidney Janis, and Richard Bellamy.  Those dealers were already established when Baker connected with them, but with Leo Castelli, Baker began at the beginning, from the moment that the gallery opened in February 1957.[1]  

Baker began a diary at the age of eleven, and kept at it for seven decades, leaving us an intimate history of the New York art scene, larded with reflections on collecting. On February 23,1957, Leo Castelli entered the diary for the first time: “Leo Castelli, an art collector for twenty years who recently became a dealer, showed me in his new gallery a 1939 painting by … Fernand Léger.” The Léger, in the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, was beyond Baker’s means: Castelli, he wrote, “would not part with it for under $8,000.”

Money was an incessant concern for Baker, and it is a leitmotif in his diaries.  Scion of an old New England family, he graduated from Yale in 1935 and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After failed attempts at journalism, he entered government service in Washington, D.C., ending up at the OSS and then the CIA. Baker quit his job in 1949 to try writing, expecting to live on an income from an inheritance. By the early 1960s, Baker received about $15,000 a year – $150,000 in today’s money. He should have been comfortable, especially if he stuck to his original plan of buying five or six small works a year.  Instead, the collecting bug bit Baker hard, and practicality vanished.  “It is as troublesome for me to give up buying pictures as it is for some people to stop smoking,” he wrote on November 9, 1957. 

To sustain a collecting habit of 20-80 pieces a year,[2] Baker went into debt, buying on credit and paying on installment. He always made good on his I.O.U.’s, so the galleries went along with the arrangement.  At one point, he owed fifteen dealers $13,000. On holidays, his mother sent him checks for a few thousand dollars that promptly went to creditors. Otherwise Baker bobbed in a sea of insolvency. Installment buying was (and is) a common practice for reliable clients, so when dealers like Janis, Kootz, or Castelli supported them with lenient financial agreements, they too were short of money.  (In early 1962, when Ivan Karp, Castelli’s associate director, offered Baker a painting for a reduced price of $1,000, Baker warned him that “prompt payment couldn’t be expected.”  “Do you know what this gallery is owed?,” Karp confided. “Sixty-two thousand.”)

Baker’s comparatively limited income shaped his mission. Although he did buy names during his first years in New York, he recognized that his money would go further and be better spent if he embraced the young and uncelebrated. And Baker was curious to know if his judgments would hold up in the future. “I am a speculator in aesthetics, but do not consider myself an investor of art values,” he wrote. “I do not buy with the idea of eventually selling. My collection is being formed as a gamble in taste. It justifies itself currently because the pictures afford me visual satisfaction…. the collection … makes me feel alive, active, in touch with the creativity of my own times.” A new generation of artists to gamble on was emerging, and Baker would discover them through his association with Leo Castelli.

By November 1957, Baker was involved enough with Castelli to be consulted about an exhibition.  The final show of that year featured collectors’ choices, and Baker was a participant. Twenty collectors each presented a single work of art from an artist not represented by the gallery.  Baker chose the Spanish-born Abstract Expressionist Esteban Vicente, and his first purchase from Castelli was a charcoal drawing by Vicente, in 1958.

The year 1958 was an annus mirabilis for the gallery, when Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had their first shows, and Castelli decisively shifted from being a regulation purveyor of Abstract Expressionism and the School of Paris – a domain that had him competing with a host of other dealers – to heading an outpost for the burgeoning avant-garde.  Baker was a regular at gallery openings in 1958 and 1959; in 1960 he became an avid client, buying paintings and sculpture by Nassos Daphnis, Bernard Langlais, John Chamberlain, Rauschenberg, and Johns. In an undated (and updated) diary entry from spring 1960, Baker wrote,

On March 10th, I bought my first, and regrettably my only, oil by Jasper Johns.  Vividly I recall walking along … towards Castelli’s rear gallery…. I remember passing an exposed closet with a shelf. On that shelf my eye glimpsed a row of uniformly small paintings less than a foot tall, each depicting a numeral from zero through nine.

Figure 3 sang out to me.  Whether it was actually the finest is debatable, but it was instantaneously the painting I wanted.  I fell in love with it….Had I had the market foresight I would have aimed to get the whole series, but serial painting was not a concept I was familiar with …. I could not, moreover, consider financially ten small paintings by the same youthful artist. I simply asked Ivan if I could obtain [it]. Possibly Ivan consulted Leo. I don’t recall, but it was Ivan who said, “The Figure 3? We’ll make it $300.” For $300 I acquired Johns’s little oil, the only one in the series that was painted on the reverse as well as on the front of the picture.

Nothing caused Baker as much friction as his enthusiasm for Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein had joined Castelli in October 1961, and in November, presumably tipped off by Castelli or Karp, Baker went to see his work. On November 30, he bought Washing Machine, a cool depiction of a manicured hand pouring detergent into a top-loading model. It cost $575. Baker was said to be the third person to buy a Lichtenstein Pop painting; as such, he was one of the original believers in Lichtenstein’s art.[3] In his diary for November 30, Baker did not mention Washing Machine. Instead he recorded one of his least prescient remarks: “I despair of being able to keep it [the collection] alive through growth. I haven’t the money to develop it as I’d like…. I must struggle against a decline.”

Many of Baker’s friends in the art world disapproved of Lichtenstein. The art administrator Virginia Field chose to face the wall when she came to dinner so she wouldn’t have to look at any of his work. The painter Milton Goldring was “shocked” that Castelli was promoting someone “who just does enlarged comic strip cartoons.” Baker argued for Lichtenstein’s affinities with Léger and his “keen sense of design” in vain. MoMA curator Peter Selz, an adversary of Pop, chatted with Baker in January 1962 about “that dreadful painter Leo Castelli is about to foist on us.” When Baker informed him that he liked Lichtenstein’s work enough to own it, Selz replied, “Well, you’ve got a lot of good pictures. We can allow you a few bad ones.”

Castelli and Karp invited Baker to see some canvases arriving in the gallery on January 3, 1962. He had an early view of Turkey, Keds, and Electric Cord, “by the ‘unknown’ whom they are about to explode on the art scene.” Karp told Baker that there would be more new paintings by Lichtenstein on January 16th, and they would “knock him out.”  That day Baker was shown “two … pictures, one of an Air Force officer kissing a girl [The Kiss], the other, wildly explosive, with BLAM written on it, depicting the blazing destruction of a plane with the pilot ejected from his doomed ship … This painting [was] dynamic and bound to shock.” Blam was one Lichtenstein’s most powerful pictures to date, and “[b]oth Leo and Ivan were excited in their praise for it.”

Baker had hoped to get a small Lichtenstein to go with the larger Washing Machine, but the idea of acquiring Blam was more exhilarating.  “As Leo remarked,” he wrote, “its whirling violence is at the opposite extreme from the crisp calmness of Washing Machine. To have them both would be to acknowledge the two polarities of the artist’s talent.” Castelli told Karp to offer Baker a discount, and the $1,200 price tag was cut to $1,000. Baker was not in funds, but he had to buy it. “Without the taking of risks,” he told himself, “a great collection is not formed.”

Baker acquired a stark silkscreen-on-canvas version of Electric Chair by Andy Warhol in 1965 and two years later he snapped up a blackboard painting by Cy Twombly. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Baker bought works on paper from Castelli by Johns, Chamberlain, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, and Twombly.  His collecting activity at the gallery slowed after 1980; the once-obscure artists he had championed in the 1960s were financially out of reach. 

Ultimately money was beside the point. Baker never sold anything from his collection, donating most of it to Yale University Art Gallery. His real contribution, he said, was “to be there and buy what’s not yet wanted.”[4]

[1] Richard Brown Baker, diary, undated entry, 1962, Richard Brown Baker Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Ct.  Unless otherwise noted, the rest of the quotations come from Baker’s diaries, in the following order:  February 23, 1957; November 9, 1957; January 16, 1962; undated entry, 1958; undated postscript, c. June 1962; November 30, 1961; December 1961; [late]January 1962; January 3, 1962; and January 16, 1962.

[2] See Elise K. Kenney with Gabriella Svenningsen Omonte, “Chronology,” in Jennifer Farrell et al., Get There First, Decide Promptly: The Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 346-363.

[3]  In 1961, even the artists already in Castelli’s gallery were aghast at Lichtenstein’s work and did not want it represented there.  See my essay, “Roy Lichtenstein’s Phantom Debut: How an Exhibition and a Career Came to Be,” published in this blog on February 9, 2024.

[4] Quoted in Roberta Smith, “Richard Brown Baker, Collector and Donor of Contemporary Art, Dies at 89,” New York Times, January 27, 2002, 41. Baker owned more than 1,600 works.  Yale received everything except for about 400 works of British art, which Baker gave to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.