Interview with Doris and Donald Fisher Neal Benezra As an Opening

Interview with Doris and Donald Fisher Neal Benezra As an opening question, I wondered whether there was anything in your families that predisposed you to art? Was art part of your lives growing up? Doris: No, my parents had several paintings but nothing by a well-known artist. And Don’s family was not into art, either. Basically, we became interested in it at the same time. My friend Peggy Walker was the one who started us on the “art road.” It was through her that we became interested in prints in 1973. We started collecting seriously—it’s hard to believe—in 1976. Don: Gap went public in 1976, and I thought that was all I needed for the rest of my life. It certainly was enough to start collecting, as prices then were substantially lower than they are today. I have always categorized myself as a visual person. I remember things visually more than in any other way. When I finished college, I worked in the mill and cabinet and construction business. We specialized in designing and building homes along with other speculative building projects. So we worked with architects and were exposed to their design ideas. Later, when we started the Gap, it was always important to me that our stores have interesting graphics and be well designed. I also classify myself as an entrepreneur—which is probably an understatement. I’m always thinking of ways you can make money out of an idea. That really has nothing to do with our buying art, however. We started out with prints, which is a great way to begin learning about an artist’s work and to start collecting. As we went to museum exhibitions and gallery shows, we began to learn more and to discover what we really liked. Doris: We collected prints quite differently from most people, however. We collected whole suites. So you would purchase a set of prints from Gemini or Tyler Graphics? Doris: Yes. We bought complete sets by Frank Stella and Roy Lichtenstein. You can say that about the whole collection. Its depth is one of its distinguishing characteristics. The average collector buys single works by individual artists. I think what you’ve done so well is to make choices and cover different periods and then go really deep. You have selected very, very well. Don: To be honest, it’s hard for me to analyze how we determined the particular group of artists we pursued in depth. My major criteria when we started buying, however, was that I wanted to purchase art that could be sold at auction, although we have rarely sold anything unless we disliked it. I have seen you quote from one of my predecessors as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Henry Hopkins, whom you recall saying in the early 1970s that if a collector buys a lot of $5,000 works of art, he or she eventually will have a basement full of $5,000 art. Don: Right. Also, I don’t think I’m smart enough to be able to pick out the emerging artist who is going to be great. So you don’t consider yourself a talent scout. Don: Correct. Although I think we have put together a wonderful collection, it’s difficult to determine what makes an artist great. History will be the judge. There is a lot of promotion, hype, speculation, and aggressive dealing. We often wait until artists start to become a bit more established before we make a commitment. Most of the artists represented in our collection are among today’s older artists; only a few are under sixty years old. The implication is that you allow the dealers to do their work. They identify the up-and- coming artists and then you and Doris collect those whom you feel have great creativity and you enjoy living with. Don: That’s right. You can watch an artist develop for two or three years and you might pay a premium for his or her art, but you don’t make as many mistakes. We also got to know some dealers well, such as Paula Cooper, Mary Boone, Marian Goodman, André Emmerich, and Pace in New York and Anthony d’Offay in London. We listened to them. Doris: I don’t think that’s how we did it. Whenever we went to New York, we would check out our Gap stores. When we finally got bitten by the art bug, we started going to galleries too. We love picking the art ourselves, which is why we never wanted to have a curator. Don: Speaking for myself, I want to have the fun of going out and finding new works. I enjoy visiting artists’ studios. I guess you could say that the collection is the result of our looking a lot and then looking some more. I have worked on the West Coast, the East Coast, and in the Midwest, and I have discovered that West Coast collectors seem to use consultants the most. In fact, many of the major collectors on the West Coast have art advisors. Perhaps this is a matter of geography, in that people here simply cannot get to New York as often as they might like. Don: The reason we don’t have a consultant is that if we did, the collection would be about them and not us. We developed self-confidence as time went along because we did not have an advisor. You might say that Doris’s close friend Peggy Walker was our advisor when we started. She was great. It was sad that she passed away at such a young age. Jane Richards has also been a great help over the years. Our collection has come largely from purchases at auction and maybe from four or five dealers. The dealers are important: you really have to have confidence in them. Originally, we went to André Emmerich, then to Arne Glimcher at Pace. We bought a number of works from Paula Cooper, Anthony d’Offay, Larry Gagosian, Barbara Gladstone, Marian Goodman, and Matthew Marks. These dealers have had the best artists, in my opinion. I should mention that we have not been interested in buying anything that was too tough in terms of content. But you have an extraordinary collection of Andy Warhol. You have some Disaster paintings, such as Most Wanted Men (1964) and Tunafish Disaster (1963). Don: Yes, but we never acquired any of the really violent Disaster paintings and we did not buy the Electric Chairs. It is interesting to think about the artists whose work we have not bought: Damien Hirst, Robert Gober, and Jeff Koons, for example. Do you think your tastes have changed through the years? Don: I will never forget walking into Documenta 8 in 1987 and seeing the work of Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz for the first time. They are still very interesting to us. I don’t think our tastes have changed that much. In the last few years, we have tried to fill in works by certain artists for whom we had strong holdings but were missing important periods. We have strong late paintings by Philip Guston, for example, but we did not have a great work from the 1950s until recently: we paid a premium and got a great abstract painting at auction, The Street, from 1956. That painting came from a private collection in Chicago and I remember it well. I also remember that when I first arrived at SFMOMA you told me that you had a superb group of Gerhard Richter paintings, but that you thought you needed a Cityscape to round out the collection. Don: That’s right, and you found us a terrific painting, Stadtbild Madrid (Cityscape Madrid; 1968). In this regard, it occurs to me that in general I never felt we got a good deal on any work we have bought. I have always felt we paid top price at the time. That is really interesting because it has also been my experience that sometimes collectors have to pay top price to get something important that one really wants. But if over time it proves to be truly great, you forget the price, and it turns out to be cheap. Don: We have never been sellers, but it is certainly a psychological satisfaction—even a compliment—when you discover that the value of the work proves to be substantially more than you paid for it. Today, a great Warhol can cost more than we paid for all our Warhol paintings combined. Are there artists whom you feel you missed and regret not collecting? Don: I think we missed Robert Rauschenberg and started collecting Willem de Kooning too late, and only collected later works. We probably should have bought more Bruce Nauman. You have that extraordinary Nauman neon Life Death / Knows Doesn’t Know of 1983. Doris: Yes, but we generally veer toward work that we find more aesthetic. Don: That’s right. That’s a very good description. We bought works that were visually appealing to us. Doris: If there is one thing that I would love to have, it is a great drawing by Matisse. We have a wonderful Diebenkorn drawing in our home in Atherton and it reminds me of Matisse. I happen to love drawings. Don: It’s important to note that our collection would probably be two or three times larger had Doris not been the voice of reason. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about is San Francisco’s development as an art city.

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