[ed. I just read this morning that six members of the Walmart family are financially worth as much as the bottom 30 percent of all Americans. For a detailed account of Walmart's beginnings and a better understanding of its policies and impacts read John Lanchester's excellent article: The Price of Pickles.]
On the morning of December 1, 2004, Sotheby’s offered at auction one of the last great private troves of American art. Daniel Fraad, who died in 1987, made his fortune supplying fuel to airlines; in the late forties, he and his wife, Rita, began amassing American paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including works by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Hopper. When the Fraads started buying, their taste was not especially fashionable—French art was more in vogue—but by the time of Rita Fraad’s death, in May, 2004, American art was highly sought after, and the seventy-eight works on the block at Sotheby’s were estimated to be worth between thirty million and forty-five million dollars.
The sale got under way at a quarter past ten, and the first lot, a portrait by the naturalist painter Gari Melchers, sold to a telephone bidder for more than nine hundred thousand dollars, seven times what was expected. The sixth lot, “The Little White House,” a 1919 landscape by Willard Metcalf, sold for just over a million dollars—nearly three times its estimate, and also to a buyer on the phone. As a reporter for Maine Antique Digest noted, “People began to wonder: with almost every collector one could think of present in the room, who the heck could be on the phone?”
One of the phone bidders that day was a collector whose activities had thus far gone largely unnoticed by the art world: Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, who died in 1992. The youngest of Walton’s four children, Alice, who was born in 1949 and grew up in Bentonville, Arkansas, was a member of the richest family in America. The Waltons were worth some ninety billion dollars at the time—as much as the fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined. Alice had started buying art in the seventies, mostly watercolors by American artists, but by the late nineties she had become a more serious collector; she hung the works on the walls of her ranch outside of Fort Worth, where she raised, bred, and rode cutting horses, which are trained to work with cattle. In fact, as the auction got under way in New York, Walton was at the Will Rogers Coliseum, in Fort Worth, preparing to compete in the first qualifying round of the National Cutting Horse Association Futurity.
So it was from the saddle of a three-year-old gelding named IC Lad that Walton successfully bid for several lots from the Fraad collection: “Spring,” a gorgeous watercolor of a rural scene, by Winslow Homer; “A French Music Hall,” by Everett Shinn, the Ashcan School artist; and “The Studio,” by George Bellows, which depicts the artist at work with his children playing at his feet. Collectively, these works cost Walton more than twelve million dollars. She competed with IC Lad before lunchtime—they were in the third round, fourth horse—then returned to making bids during the afternoon session at Sotheby’s. From the collection of Pierre Bergé, the co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent, she bought several notable works, including “The Indian and the Lily”—an exquisite rendering of a muscular Native American, by George de Forest Brush—and “October Interior,” a sunny, celadon-hued painting of a domestic scene, by Fairfield Porter.
By the end of the day, Walton had spent more than twenty million dollars on art. She had also prevailed at the Will Rogers Coliseum, placing sixty-second out of three hundred and seventy-four entrants, which allowed her to advance to the next round. Indeed, she made it all the way to the finals, which took place on December 10th. Walton came in nineteenth out of twenty riders—not a spectacular result but one that came with a prize of nearly thirteen thousand dollars.
by Rebbeca Mead, New Yorker | Read more:
