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 .

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 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 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 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. I worked in Chicago for about seven or eight years; it has had a great community of collectors for many decades—really since the late nineteenth century. That’s how the Art Institute of Chicago came to be home to all those great impressionist paintings. On the other hand, San Francisco always had a reputation as a city most interested in the performing arts. But that changed in the 1980s, when collecting modern and contemporary art really took hold here.

Doris: Perhaps the impetus was the formation of the Collectors Forum at SFMOMA in 1978. It would be interesting to find out whether this is really true. It brought me, for one, into the museum more—every month or every other month.

Don: Peggy Walker definitely was involved in organizing the Collectors Forum. And in their time here, Jack Lane and John Caldwell got it kick-started and encouraged some of the museum trustees to become more interested in buying contemporary art. They also introduced us to emerging artists such as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, and Bruce Nauman.

We took trips with Jack and John to Germany and had access to amazing private collections. I remember in 1987 when we were courting Jack to take the director’s job here, Brooks Walker and I took him to lunch. Jack said, “I want to acquire an Anselm Kiefer painting for the museum.” I said, “Okay, and what else do you want to make you decide to come to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art?” Jack said he wanted a $500,000-per-year acquisition fund. I said, “Okay—anything else?” He said no. He accepted the job and then I started the acquisition fund by forming a committee of twenty trustees, each contributing $25,000 per year.

In my opinion, you have the finest private collection of Kiefer’s work. The museum’s acquisition of the Kiefer, in a way, marked a new level of ambition with regard to the museum and its collecting policy.

Doris: I remember when we visited Kiefer and went through his studio. He had a fabulous painting of flowers behind his desk that I would have loved to acquire. He was in the middle of a divorce, however, and his wife specifically wanted that piece, so we were not able to get it.

Don: One aspect of our collecting that has been very important to us through the years has been the opportunity to develop personal relationships with some of the artists whose work we collect. Artists are very creative people, interesting thinkers, and we enjoy knowing them on a personal level, for example, Ellsworth Kelly, Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Beverly Pepper, Richard Serra, and Mark di Suvero.

Doris: And Magdalena Abakanowicz, who invited us to the ceremony when she received the international sculpture prize for lifetime achievement. She has done a major installation in Grant Park in Chicago and just finished a sculpture for the Denver Art Museum. We have a major piece of hers, Big Figures, which we loaned to Princeton because we didn’t have a place to install it. We sponsored her lecture at Princeton and have a strong friendship with her.

We visited Henry Moore in his country home many years ago and Antony Gormley in his studio north of London.

There was a show of Moore’s work that I’ll never forget as long as I live. It was at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where they have a great collection of Moore’s plasters—the originals from which the bronzes were cast. They are just extraordinary.

Don: When you see the plasters, you really understand the greatness of Henry Moore. Sometimes people underestimate his achievement, but the plasters and carved wood sculptures really tell the story.

As I turn back to the list of artists whom we have come to know, I want to mention Sol LeWitt, who became a good friend. We spent a fair amount of time with him. The mural that he did for our swimming pool in our San Francisco home, is, I think, the best wall drawing that he made.

We’ve spent time with Richard Long, and have gone to Brice Marden’s studio and visited with him regularly. Doris spent a little time with Agnes Martin in her studio. We have spent considerable time with because we commissioned him and his wife, , to do the public sculpture Cupid’s Span (2002) in the park across the street from Gap headquarters.

And, of course, there is Gerhard Richter. We know him quite well, have met his family, and have gone to his home and studio several times. As you know, we have assembled a major collection of his works.

Doris: We’ve come to know a lot of the artists as a result of our involvement with SFMOMA. Don started the Accessions Committee and chaired it for several years. For a time I also sat on the Committee on Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and we have been involved with the Collectors Committee at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Back to the San Francisco Bay Area for a second, because that’s an important point and provides an interesting context in which to consider your collecting. One of the things that has really impressed me in San Francisco is that there is now a considerable amount of collecting activity and energy operating with regard to art acquisition. It seems to have come out of nowhere—there were not so many great collectors here before—but starting in the mid-1980s, it turned serious. I don’t know if it’s an actual competition or not, but there seems to be an atmosphere—a spirit—here that most cities don’t have. It seems that there is a group of collectors who keep pushing one another forward.

Doris: We live in such a small city, and many of us know each other well.

Don: I’ve been told that we had an influence on what some people bought. We bought Richard Serra in depth, though I don’t know if we were the first ones to buy his work. We bought Ellsworth Kelly in depth, though again, I don’t know if we were the first. We probably were the first collectors in the city to collect works by Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, Gerhard Richter, and Anselm Kiefer.

One significant way in which you have been very influential in the community is by allowing access to the collection and letting people come and see what you’re doing. There are a number of collectors who don’t do that. I think in this area, you have really been leaders.

Don: We do think it’s important for the community and for the art world alike. We feel a sense of responsibility with regard to the collection and to the artists. I don’t know if you had the same problem in Chicago, where you said there are not many younger collectors.

There are definitely younger collectors accumulating nice collections here. Part of it has to do with photography, which accounts for a significant amount of collecting in the Bay Area.

Don: In part, that may be because photography is less expensive. I’m not saying that in any adverse way. I’m simply acknowledging that given the price of art today, new collectors are going to have to find a whole new group of artists if they don’t want to pay today’s inflated prices. It’s a general rule—though there are some major exceptions—work issued in an edition is less expensive than a unique piece.

I should note that you also have collected the photography of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Laura McPhee, as well as the photo- based work of Sophie Calle. Another interesting thing about your collection is where it is housed. It’s not a corporate collection, but the majority of it is installed here at the Gap headquarters and available for the staff to learn from and enjoy. When you come to Gap for lunch and sit in the café, there it is. It’s a great thing to have it here on view. Have you had many comments about the art from the staff?

Don: In areas especially frequented by the staff, we have hung a lot of terrific prints by Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein, and multiples by Jasper Johns and others. We have a number of large-scale prints by Roy Lichtenstein installed in the lobby, which can be seen by the public as well as the staff.

Our grandchildren bring their classes to view the collection. Every once in a while, I get a note from someone saying how wonderful it is to visit our galleries, and people do bring their families through. Some of the feedback that I get has been that our collection is better than what a lot of the museums are showing. But that may be because the experience of seeing a collection outside of a museum is less common and therefore more impressive or memorable.

Doris: It’s very satisfying for both of us to have and exhibit our collection in a place where many people can enjoy the works or learn something from them. We give tours of the collection to Gap employee groups and to museum groups from around the world. The art always manages to elicit different ideas and opinions from those who look at the collection. We’re lucky to have the ability to buy such great art, and very proud to be able to share it.

This text represents an abridged version of a conversation that took place in San Francisco in March 2007. The art galleries at Gap headquarters closed in fall 2014.