After more than 30 years working in museums, Derek Gillman has switched to the commercial side of culture and joined Christie’s. “This role felt exciting in ways I can’t fully analyse,” says the former director of Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation. “And I quite like adventure.”
Gillman is the new chairman of Christie’s Impressionist and Modern department, and senior vice president for the Americas, based in New York. The auction house, which has played second fiddle to Sotheby’s in this field for the past several years, has appointed Gillman to woo clients, encourage consignments and develop business in Asia. “That’s the idea, and I hope to be able to do it,” he says.
Born in Britain in 1952, Gillman has spent most of the past 20 years outside the UK. He was the keeper (director) of the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia for ten years from 1985, leaving to become deputy director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. He was director and then president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1999 until 2006, when he joined the Barnes Foundation as its director and president until 2013, overseeing the institution’s controversial relocation to downtown Philadelphia.
Shared interests
“The people to whom you go for support with museums, and the people one might approach for help in putting an auction together often overlap considerably,” Gillman says. “They are people who are either major collectors, or people involved in art in important ways, so there are certain shared interests.”
Gillman actually began his career at Christie’s in 1977, working in the Chinese art department for four years before becoming a research assistant for Chinese Art at the British Museum. His return to the auctions would have been unimaginable a decade ago, he says. “The divide used to be so sharp. When I moved from Christie’s, it was made clear to me that I’d stepped over an abyss and come to safety on the other side. Now the worlds are much closer.
Mission statement
The difference remains one of mission. “Museums have always been involved in the market. The distinction is that their primary mission is not in the transaction but in the preservation of objects. I love that—it’s a fine and honourable mission, and I gave 30 years of my life to it. It’s not the same as the mission of an auction house, but it doesn’t mean we can’t all speak to each other,” he says.
“A trustee in Melbourne used to say that we weren’t a not-for-profit, but a not-for-loss. That speaks reams about what museums are—you just don’t want to lose money, whereas private companies actually want to be profitable,” Gillman says.
His knowledge of Asian culture will be a boon to the Christie’s, which was the first Western auction house to be granted a licence to operate on the mainland in 2013, though its revenue in Asia has been faltering. As for China’s recent economic slowdown, Gillman says: “I’m not terribly worried. China has been a leading world civilisation for centuries, and it’s really not going to go away anytime soon.”
Gillman read Chinese Studies as an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, before spending a year at the Beijing Languages Institute. “As Chinese and Western cultures are becoming more deeply linked, the opportunities to think about cultural transmission through an auction house are really interesting,” he says. “It’s a fascinating time in history because of political circumstances, and there are ways in which one might be able to have more of an impact than through a museum,” he says, but adds cheerfully, “I may be wrong—I’m brand new in this role, after all.”
Cultural exchange will “require more knowledge of the West in China” than vice versa, he says. “Western museums have been acquiring Chinese art for a century, and that’s not been the case with Chinese museums [and] Western art. If one is looking for increased cultural understanding, it would be very good if there was more Western art in China, which is more of a mono-culture than Europe and America. China is still dominantly Han and diversification would be quite good.”
The Chinese government is trying to create higher standards in its museums, Gillman says. “They’re thinking about how to make the profession more robust because historically it’s been a public service job, which means you don’t necessarily need to have come through the museum ranks to lead a museum. That’s going to change but it’ll take time.”
He says the main challenge lies in intellectual infrastructure. “Some of the things we take for granted in terms of conflicts are not always obvious in China because legal and political systems have evolved differently. Certain elements have to change. For example, a contract means something different in China than in the West. It’s not necessarily that the Western model is the best model, but there will probably be certain characteristics of the Western model required.”
For now, his immediate focus is on the May auctions of Impressionist and Modern art in New York, he says. Beyond this, he says he is “not in that camp of people who really worry about the next step of their life. I always sort of say, ‘There’s the mountain—climb it’. Christie’s seemed like a really interesting mountain, and a good move at this point in my career and my life.”