Art collector Bruce Bailey always makes an impression,
Former owner of the paintings that got Evan Solomon in trouble, Bruce Bailey is as charismatic as he’s brilliant
It was the dead of winter and performance artist Marina Abramovic, in Toronto for the screening of a documentary film about her, sat at a long dark table in her hotel suite.
She was fighting a cold but she’d already had a visitor, one who arrived with a full, comforting teapot, lavender honey from near his farm and, for a touch of whimsy, a statuette of the queen.
Who brought all these wonderful gifts, she was asked.
“The most eccentric Bruce Bailey,” she said in her thick Slavic purr.
“I call him, after Oscar Wilde, the most romantic dandy. There is nobody left in the world like him. He is so special.”
That Bailey’s arrival would be curative is no surprise. He has been passionately nurturing the art scene in Canada since the 1980s as a patron, a collector and, as the greater world learned this week, a dealer with exquisite taste and precious works to sell.
Bailey, who reportedly starts his day at 6:30 by reading New York gossip columns on line, was thrust into the news pages last week when journalist Evan Solomon was fired from the CBC for a breach of ethics. As the Star’s Kevin Donovan reported, his dismissal was linked to the sale of Bailey-owned paintings to Jim Balsillie and Mark Carney. Bailey was prominent in the stories because of a squabble with Solomon, who brokered the deals, over commissions.
Bailey was doing what collectors do. He sold some of his art — “likely to buy more art,” suggested an acquaintance — and it’s no surprise that, as the Star reported, Bailey and Balsillie hit it off immediately after they were introduced by Solomon.
Charm is one of Bailey’s strengths. He is described by those who know or have written about him as outrageously flamboyant and intoxicatingly fun, a social gadfly who treats attention like oxygen — he needs it to live.
Typical Bailey: at Joe Fresh and Pink Tartan runway shows during Fashion Week, he has shown up in a swashbuckling loden cape and a feathered hunting cap, signalling his appreciation for the shows with loud blasts of a flugelhorn.
Two summers ago, on a sunny afternoon, he appeared at a Toronto garden party hosted by Sen. Linda Frum adorned in a bright yellow raincoat decorated with stick-on fake flowers. He looked, according to someone in attendance, “like he was portable art. He was his own canvas.”
A towering presence — some peg him at 6-foot-4 — he is always immaculate and stylish, favouring a look he calls “Edwardian retro.” He has shown up on a New York party-invite list that included Bjork, James Franco, Michael Stipe and Liv Tyler. He’s just as comfortable riding horseback on his 200-acre estate — one he purchased from a University of Toronto art professor that includes an opulent mansion adorned with William Ronald murals — east of Toronto. He’s a Renaissance man who has been called Canada’s Gatsby.
“Bruce is one of those old-school, wellrounded intellects,” said Toronto artist Kim Dorland in an email.
“He knows a lot about a wide breadth of things — he always surprises me with the ease he can jump into a conversation about obscure history or literature, politics, etc. etc. When it comes to art I think he’s got a great natural eye and a lot of passion, but he also backs it up with a deep knowledge of history and context.”
While he can be engaging company — “You meet him, you remember him,” says Richard Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art magazine — Toronto social columnist Shinan Govani says there is another side to Bailey.
“He certainly can be very mercurial. His close friends would come and go. He would have flavours of the month and then he would move on.
“His tirades and freezing out of friends is a well-know thing in Toronto social circles. He blows hot and cold like an air conditioner on the fritz.”
Given that aspect of his temperament, Govani says, he’s not surprised the relationship between Bailey and Solomon dissolved as quickly as it did.
It’s in the art world, particularly here in Canada, that Bailey has left an important and indelible mark as someone who fosters and develops young talent. Though consistently included in ARTnews magazine’s list of the world’s top collectors, even as his international reputation and collection grew he never turned his back on the talent he encouraged at home. It is a point of pride for him, and he counts many of those homegrown artists among his friends.
“He’s one of the most astute people on the contemporary art scene when it comes to spotting talent,” says Rhodes.
The collection of art is a very social undertaking, explains Rhodes, so if a respected leader in the field such as Bailey says “there’s a really interesting young painter out there, then a number of people will make sure they find their way to works by that interesting young painter.”
Rhodes says he found it telling that the high-priced paintings brokered by Solomon were created by artists Peter Doig and Dorland, both of whom Bailey championed in their early years.
“He’s rarely wrong,” says Rhodes. “If Bruce is behind an artist and it’s a Canadian artist who isn’t known more widely, for sure there’s an impact there. Bruce is always there first. That’s why you pay attention.”
One of Bailey’s greatest contributions, says Dorland, is “his ability and willingness to look outside of this country at what’s going on in the art world at large and think about the way Canadian artists can contribute to that conversation.”
One of Dorland’s oil paintings from Bailey’s collection was sold to Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada governor and now governor of the Bank of England, for $22,500. The work showing sunlight bursting through trees was intended as a gift for Carney’s wife.
Dorland said he has no knowledge of or interest in the machinations of what Bailey and Solomon did and doesn’t get involved in the business side. He said he prefers it that way.
He says that he and Bailey met through a mutual accountant and became friendly “after my career was already pretty well established.
“We hit it off personally and seemed to be on the same wavelength when it came to art — and he genuinely liked my work and understood what I was trying to do with it.
“Over time, I would ask his advice on art matters and he was always willing to weigh in and give me his time. He’s a great eye in the studio so I’m always happy to have him come by. Our relationship has remained pretty casual; he doesn’t ‘represent’ me or anything like that.
“I guess the best way to describe it is that he has acted as an adviser — he’s helped me position my work the way I want, he’s introduced me and my work to people in his circles, he’s stopped me from making dumb moves! If a project comes up that we’re both interested in, we will do it together (for example, he curated a show of my work in Calgary). It also doesn’t hurt that if Bruce is looking at your work it means other people will too.”
While Bailey is omnipresent in the art and fashion party scenes, often hosting soirées and luncheons himself, his life remains a bit of a closed book. Even his age is uncertain. In earlier editions of the Canadian Who’s Who, his birthday was listed as March 14, 1953, which would make him 62. But that reference has been dropped from the annual and some newspaper references through the years have him several years younger.
“I spent a fair amount of time with him and I’ve known him for years but he still remains a mystery, which is what I think most people will tell you, even his close friends,” says Govani.
“He’s definitely an enigma,” says Dorland. “He lives up to his reputation for being kind, helpful and generous with artists. And he’s always the life of the party!”
When the Star broke the Solomon story, there was such an apparent affection for their benefactor, many in the Toronto art scene created a protective cocoon around Bailey, declining to comment on him or the story.
This much has become part of the long-story-short Bailey history: born in Toronto, where his father was a lawyer, he received a BA from Queen’s University in 1976 and began buying art in the late ’70s when he was a law student at Dalhousie University in Halifax. The story he tells is that he spent his scholarship money on art and then had to scramble to pay his tuition by taking a night job at a newspaper.
Bailey did practise law, had a brief marriage to Gillian MacKay that resulted in a son and picked up at master’s degree in international law at Columbia University in New York. In 1988, he became an investment banker, forming Bailey and Company Inc., in Toronto, raising money for and investing in high-tech and biotech companies.
Success there gave him the financial independence to indulge in his passion for art.
“We focus on emerging artists,” he told the Star while acting as a corporate art committee of one for his company. “We find them a little before the wave.”
Rhodes says he doesn’t find Bailey’s business life incongruous with a man who would become such an important player in the art community.
“I knew he was an investment banker and it always struck me that his interest in art was a kind of parallel,” he says. “When it comes to spotting things that will come to be valuable in the future, Bruce has a pretty good track record.”
Bailey, in what was his first big splash on the Toronto art scene, donated about $50,000 to the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1996, according to the National Post, so it could exhibit the works of now-deceased Canadian painter Paterson Ewen. Bailey told the paper that the AGO was a “very cool place” and he donated the money “because it made me feel good to give back to an institution that I’ve enjoyed for so many years.”
Bailey married Spanish artist Alfredo Ferran Calle in 2003. He ran a storefront gallery on Spadina Ave., the Bruce Bailey Foundation. Beyond owning the work of new artists, that gave him a place to showcase up-and-comers. The gallery closed more than a decade ago.
“He understands artists in a sense because he has that kind of flare himself,” says longtime friend Jeanne Beker. “He appreciates them and they appreciate him. He doesn’t just do it as a business. He lives in that world and it’s a world he loves. He’s a bon vivant. He’s brilliant. He’s wonderfully eccentric in a good way. He’s one of those characters that makes Canada a more interesting place.” With files from Murray Whyte
“The most eccentric Bruce Bailey. I call him, after Oscar Wilde, the most romantic dandy. There is nobody left in the world like him. He is so special.” MARINA ABRAMOVIC PERFORMANCE ARTIST