The British heart-throb who outbid Cary Grant
Handsome, blond and blue-eyed, the British actor Michael York is renowned for his starring roles in popular films of the Sixties and Seventies, such as Accident, Cabaret and Logan’s Run, but, like many actors, his professional life began on the stage.
In 1965, with a degree in English literature from Oxford, and experience with the National Youth Theatre under his belt, he joined the National Theatre Company under Laurence Olivier. The romance of the stage was thus already deeply ingrained when the film camera found him in 1967, bringing sufficient wealth to buy the art he wanted. Together with his photographer wife, Pat, who met York that year while on assignment for Glamour magazine, he embarked on a collecting journey that began with stage designs by Old Masters and ended with a Picasso drawing.
In between, they accrued ceramics from English Staffordshire to Meissen – all of theatrical subjects; Indian miniatures, inspired by his work with James Ivory in The Guru (1969), as well as modern art by Renoir, David Hockney and Andy Warhol. The Warhol is a signed self-portrait Polaroid, the only surviving example of several Warhol polaroids the Yorks owned until a well-meaning cleaner cut off the signed margins to frame them.
Michael and Pat shared a love of art from the off. He obtained an A-level in art at Hurstpierpoint College in Sussex, and she attended art school not far away in Maidstone.
If you haven’t seen much of Michael York in the past 10 years, it is because he suffers from the life-threatening blood disorder amyloidosis, which caused his eyes to swell up and for him to lose his voice. Last week, he and Pat spoke to me from the Mayo Clinic, where he is receiving treatment. They have decided to downsize from their large house in Hollywood to a smaller apartment, as a consequence of which they are selling some of their art collection, beginning next week at Sotheby’s in New York with the Old Master drawings (estimates all under $10,000/£7,700).
In a lecture about the demise of connoisseurship (“We are All Dinosaurs”, 2011), the art historian John Harris described the Sixties and Seventies as a golden age for museum exhibitions of architectural, ornamental drawings and stage designs, so the Yorks were very much in the swing of scholarly fashion. Among those who gave them advice was Adrian Ward-jackson, the art historian and director of the Royal Ballet and, later, a close friend of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Hardy Amies, clothes designer to the Queen, was a friend and was involved with the second batch of the Yorks’ works, to be sold in London in June, which are costume designs made for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris in the Twenties (Amies was a fan). Many were bought in the Seventies at Sotheby’s, which pioneered the sales of Ballets Russes designs. “Our work and travels in Russia contributed directly to our desire to collect works by Bakst, Goncharova and other masters of Ballets Russes,” says Pat.
Also coming up, but in different sales, is a Winifred Nicholson landscape (estimate: £12-18,000) that the Yorks were given by John Gielgud, and a David Hockney drawing of Christopher Isherwood (estimate $20-30,000).
“That purchase was directly related to my work filming Cabaret [1972], which of course was written by Isherwood,” says Michael. “We did also have a Hockney pool painting. It was made for the 1972 Olympics LA poster, and when it came up in a charity auction, we had to outbid Cary Grant in order to buy it. Years later, we sold it along with one of our houses.”
Their last acquisition was in 1995, of a drawing of Shakespeare by Picasso that had been commissioned in 1964 to mark 400 years since the playwright’s birth. The Yorks recount how one day Michael went for a wander around Sotheby’s, where he spied the drawing by one hero of another. He told Pat about it excitedly, and she decided to buy it for him as a surprise. What followed next was an example of auction house discretion. While bidding over the phone, she heard her extension clicking. After she bought it, near the high estimate for $18,400, she asked Sotheby’s if her husband had been bidding against her. “We can’t tell you,” they said, “in case he may have been bidding for a lover.” Even with his voice impaired, I can hear Michael chuckling away in the background. The drawing is estimated to sell for $40-60,000 in May.