Hip-hop mogul P. Diddy has been revealed as the buyer of Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall’s “Past Times,” the work that sold at auction this week for $21 million, a price believed to be near the maximum paid for a living artist.
Marshall’s New York dealer, Jack Shainman, told the New York Times that P. Diddy, whose real name is Sean Combs, is the work’s buyer.
“I know that this work has found a home in a collection with purpose and an eye toward preserving legacy — that of Sean Combs, and that means a lot,” Shainman said in the Times report.
Celebrity art collectors, and rapper art collectors in particular, are nothing new. P. Diddy went public in a significant way with his predilections in 2011 when he splashed for a pair of works at Art Basel in Miami Beach, where he has become something of a fixture. Jay-Z is rumored to be the rap music world’s biggest collector of works, with a hoard estimated in value at something around a half-billion dollars. Producer Swizz Beatz acquired an Ansel Adams photograph when still a teenager, and has a substantial collection. The megasale to P. Diddy, however, lays down a significant marker. Given the new attention being paid to African-American artists in the market, other eye-opening auction prices could follow.
Like Jay-Z, who enlisted art adviser Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn in the late oughts, P. Diddy hired art adviser Maria Brito when he began collecting, to help him fine-tune his eye and expand his collection.
In a 2014 Daily Beast profile, Brito said, “I don’t want to take credit for bringing him into the art world, but before me, he didn’t really have any art. … He never had a chance for someone to explain things to him in a way that would engage his mind, like how to look at contemporary and conceptual art.”
The Marshall piece, acquired by McCormick Place in 1997 as part of an acquisition project aimed at bringing art to the city’s main convention center, hung in the South Building for years. “Past Times,” features an urban pastoral setting that could be said to be a contemporary descendant of Georges Seurat’s famed “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.
When the work was offered for auction on Wednesday, the piece purchased for $25,000 had a maximum estimate of $12 million. The actual sale price stood the art world on its ear.
Other artists included in the P. Diddy collection are Ai Weiwei, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
kmwilliams@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @tribunekevin
