“The Art of Tishman Speyer”

JERRY SPEYER, President & CEO, Tishman Speyer Properties

Next to my family and company, contemporary art is perhaps closest to my heart. I was inspired by the idea of a changing exhibit in Tishman Speyer’s many beautiful lobbies around the world as a way to share one of my great passions – contemporary art. It seemed the perfect way to offer our tenants and visitors the chance to experience the work of today’s most interesting artists.

At Rockerfeller Center in New York, one of our largest properties, once a year we sponsor a special exhibit of the work of a major contemporary artist. As an example, we presented the work of Jeff Koons, one of the most important artists working today. He created a piece called “Puppy,” an enormous sculpture of a puppy, created out of hundreds of flowering plants.

When I visited Berlin in 1989, I had the opportunity to buy a section of the Berlin Wall, an important piece of history. I chose a segment which had interesting graffiti on it, shipped it to New York and installed it at our headquarters. To my surprise, a rather well-known French graffiti artist, Thierry Noir, was visiting New York and passed the garden where the wall segment is on display. He was shocked to discover that the graffiti art he had painted on the Berlin Wall was now exhibited as part of the Speyer Family Collection in New York!

It gives me enormous pride and pleasure to be able to offer our tenants and visitors the opportunity to experience some of the great contemporary art of our time. I invite you to share this pleasure with me.

BRUCE W. FERGUSON, Dean, Columbia University School of the Arts

All art collections have an educational value, a social value and a psychological value. They are educational in that they teach us about the world we live in and how artists see it, whether the artist is Rembrandt whose age was an “embarrassment of riches,” or Warhol who came of age in the days of mass media. They are social in that they cause discussion – disagreements, arguments, provocations and consensus – about who we are, where we are and where we are going, to paraphrase a title of one of Paul Gauguin’s paintings. Collections of contemporary art, in particular, act as an index – no less than stock market quotations – of the condition of the culture. And they are psychological in that they speak to us of things hidden or repressed or not yet spoken. Like a discovery of any kind – scientific or historical – contemporary art in a sustained collection speaks to us of the complexities and ambiguities of life’s conditions.

The Tishman Speyer exhibits do all these things well, and do them in public as an act of generosity and magnification. From the Fernand Leger painting of workers constructing a building to a figure of a homeless man by Gavin Turk, we see the world of the twentieth century reflected in the attitudes towards our culture – our collective lives. We also see straightforward beauty in a Terry Winters abstract canvas that continues the exploration of form and color begun in the past century or in the impact on the nervous system the multiple spikes have that are embedded in Antony Gormley’s anonymous figure.

In the Tishman Speyer presentations, there is an obvious passion for the ambitious image as well as the modest; for the spectacular and the mundane; for the strange and the conventional; and for the humorous as well as the serious. Many of the artists are known today but weren’t when their works were purchased, and some will most likely fade from view as time passes. The Speyer Family Collection is extremely special in that it reflects the excitement of creation at the moment of its creation, but through a half century of activity, it represents the way in which artists and we, ourselves, have tried to come to terms with the world in which we live – with its flaws and its flavors.