Beastie Boys’ Mike Disselling his mom’s $3 million art collection.
Before he was Mike D of the Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond was best known as the son of Harold and Hester Diamond. “My mom and dad were completely integrated into the New York City contemporary art world before I was born,” says Diamond of his dealer-collector parents. “Quite a number of the Rothkos that are sold at Sotheby’s today at some point went through my parents.”
After Diamond’s father died in 1982, his mother “didn’t want to continue collecting contemporary pictures,” he says, and pivoted to buying old masters. “We were all quite taken aback when all of a sudden she announced she was switching tacks completely.”
She sold the modern art and started to buy old art. Simultaneously, she sold off the antique furniture in her sprawling Central ParkWest apartment and bought “really bright contemporary furniture,” Diamond says.
“I think it almost seems like a cliche, where this woman’s husband dies and she immediately goes from contemporary to Renaissance and old masters,” he continues. “I’m sure there was a long line of people saying: ‘Hester what are you doing? You have this incredible collection, why would you ever switch it up?’ “
But his mother had “this complete faith in her own point of view, and (that guided) her collecting with complete fearlessness,” he says.
After Hester Diamond’s death in February, Diamond and his brother decided to sell her old masters, contemporary art, contemporary furniture, books, and crystals altogether. The collection will be offered in standalone live and online sales as “Fearless:
The Collection of Hester Diamond” at Sotheby’s in January.
The live evening sale will include 60 lots, with an overall value in the range of $30 million.
“The juxtaposition of styles of furniture and paintings and sculpture is honestly, very striking,” Diamond says. “It really is something that’s rare in our world, that we have people like my mom, who are so comfortable in their own point of view.”
Harold and Hester Diamond started out modestly. Harold was a schoolteacher before he became an art dealer; Hester began as a social worker.
Soon, Harold started as a dealer and quickly acquired a series of deep-pocketed clients, including J. Seward Johnson, one of the heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune.
“When Iwas born, my dadwas
starting to do much better in his business,” Diamond says, “and so I had this incredible childhood where I was able to grow up around really amazing modernist pictures, becausemy dad dealt at home.”
The walls were filled with works by Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, and the dwelling was filled with those artists, who often swung by for visits.
Yet the siren song of St. Marks Placewas too loud for the teenage Diamond to ignore.
“Even though it seemed relatively cool to be in an apartment with Rothkos on the wall — and Barnett Newman riding a tricycle around the apartment — being a punk-rock kid, I couldn’t wait to get downtown. It all seemed pretty square,” he says.
Still, Diamond says that his par
ents’ lives affected his professional trajectory.
“I think the biggest gift I grew up with in that apartment in the El Dorado was that my opinion mattered. That was really, really important,” Diamond says. “It made it seem like, of course I’m in a band with these kids I grew up with, and we want to make rap music because that’s all we listen to. Then, of course, we can do that, too.”
Hester, for her part, devoted nearly 40 years to old masters, even as she crisscrossed the globe attending avant-garde art music recitals, attending Wagner’s Ring cycles, andmeeting artists young and old.
“Mymomwas a practitioner of what I would call ‘the immersion practice,’” Diamond says. “She was not a dip-her-toe-in-the-water kind of person; it was sink or swim for her.”
Among other endeavors, she was the founding president of the Medici Archive Project, a research institution dedicated to studying the 200-year epistolary collection of the Medici grand dukes. She also donated numerous paintings to museums as her collecting evolved.
Now, buyers around the world will have a chance to sample a bit of Hester Diamond’s taste for themselves.
The lead lot of the sale is “Autumn,” a sculpture by baroque artists Pietro and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, estimated to draw from $8 million to $12 million.
Other major works include a triptych by the Flemish master Pieter Coecke van Aelst from about 1520 and two large paintings by Italian Renaissance painter Dosso Dossi.