Adolph Alfred Taubman, the shopping-mall entrepreneur who acquired Sotheby’s in 1983 and went to prison in 2002 for commission-fixing when he was Sotheby’s chairman, died on 17 April in Bloomfield Hills, a Detroit suburb. Taubman was 91.
Before buying Sotheby Parke Bernet (as it was then known), Taubman owned A&W Restaurants, a fast food chain that had begun as a root beer stand, and embodied America’s drive-in culture. Art was like root beer, he declared. His statement was intended to shake up what was then a sleepy auction business. “Selling art has much in common with selling root beer,” he said. “People don’t need root beer and they don’t need to buy a painting, either. We provide them a sense that it will give them a happier experience.”
A scene reported by Robert Lacey in his 1998 book on Sotheby’s caught some of Taubman’s spirit: “‘Is it true,’ asked one journalist, ‘that you are buying the business out of petty cash?’ ‘No cash is petty,’ replied the new owner of Sotheby’s.”
Sotheby’s grew in the 1980s as money flowed in to buy Impressionists paintings and almost anything else—some of it later found to have been laundered by Japanese buyers. Renoir had replaced root beer, at a much higher price, and Taubman seemed vindicated. Describing auctions as a service business, the plain-spoken Taubman insisted that snobbery be eliminated from exchanges between auction employees and clients. And he expanded the firm’s premises, constructing a ten-story box on the site of an old Kodak warehouse in New York on York Avenue. The huge salerooms were in expectation of the masses that the retailer wanted to reach. Yet in the 1990s, after the market shrank, competition sharpened between Sotheby’s and Christie’s, squeezing profits.
Following an investigation into collusion between the two auction houses in fixing the rates of commission charged to clients, executives at Christie’s agreed to provide evidence for the government probe. Sotheby’s chief executive Diana “DeDe” Brooks also co-operated with the inquiry in the hope of receiving reduced punishment. This left two principal defendants: Taubman and Anthony Tennant, of Christie’s, who remained in the UK, and could not be extradited. Taubman therefore became the sole person to stand trial, in New York in 2001.
Taubman denied all the charges, and his lawyers argued that he was an aloof and distant figurehead, and that he had no idea of the collusion that Brooks had revealed. But he was convicted, serving more than nine months in prison and paid a $7.5m fine. “I had lost a chunk of my life, my good name and around 27 pounds,” he would say after his release, always asserting his innocence.
Taubman would soon publish his apologia pro vita sua, a 2007 memoir called Threshold Resistance. The title, referring to “the psychological boundaries that stand between your shoppers and your merchandise”, comes from a retail technique to attract customers, honed by a man who had trained as a builder and designer. According to the dealer Richard Feigen, “He seemed to have spotted a vacuum in the retailing of art at auction, so he proceeded to try to fill that vacuum.”
The Detroit Institute of Arts director, Graham Beal, said Taubman “was very generous, giving tens of millions of dollars to the various campaigns.” A work in the museum’s sculpture garden, Le Cheval Majeur (1914) by Raymond Duchamp-Villon, is a gift from Taubman. Paintings by Valentin de Boulogne, Pietro da Cortona and Guercino are on loan. Beal was unsure whether those loans might become gifts. “Alfred was always vague about that. I don’t have expectations; I have hopes,” he said. “I first met him in his office in New York when I was a candidate for the director’s job,” Beal said. “On one hand, he was very assertive and friendly. One the other hand, he wanted my opinion of a Rubens that he was thinking of buying.”
Taubman’s varied philanthropy included gifts of $160m to the University of Michigan, where he studied but never graduated (though he later received an honorary degree). His net worth at his death was $3.1bn, according to Forbes. A Taubman family spokesman, Chris Tennyson, said he had no comment on plans for the Taubman estate.