● HISTORY’S GREATEST ART collectors have often been fascinating characters too — the likes of the Medici, Charles I, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Leo and Gertrude Stein had character and hinterland as well as taste and discrimination: they didn’t just acquire art wholesale, although they could do that too, but commissioned it.
Their modern heirs are more likely simply to be very rich — the late Paul Allen with his Microsoft billions; Roman Abramovich (whose collection, according to the Oligarch Files, a recently leaked cache of financial papers, is worth, into enough art to fill an entire new museum designed by Frank Gehry in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.
