Christopher Gibbs

Swinging London 1966

Christopher Henry Gibbs (*  29. July 1938 in Hatfield , England ; †  29. July 2018 in Tangier , Morocco ) was a British dealer and collector of antiques , a significant role in the 1960s in London men's fashion and interior design played . He was considered one of the inventors of Swinging London and was referred to as the King of Chelsea .

Live and act

Christopher Gibbs and his twin sister were the youngest children of Sir Geoffrey Cokayne Gibbs, chairman of Antony Gibbs & Sons merchant bank , and his wife Helen Margaret, and the grandson of Herbert Gibbs, 1st Baron Hunsdon of Hunsdon. Gibbs had four older brothers, including the financier Roger Gibbs, who u. a. Was a member of the board of directors of Arsenal FC . Margaret Pole, 8th Countess of Salisbury , an English noblewoman from the House of Plantagenet who was entitled to the English throne due to her descent and who was executed in 1541, is believed to be one of the ancestors of the Gibbs family .

Eton College

Christopher Gibbs first attended Eton College in Berkshire , which he had to leave again at the age of 15 due to his behavior. He then went to the Stanbridge Earls School of Romsey in Hampshire and then studied in France at the Sorbonne and the University of Poitiers . He also served in the British Army , but was found unfit and discharged after three months.

In 1958 Gibbs opened an antique shop on Camden Passage in Islington , with generous financial support from his mother. He traveled regularly to Morocco and brought furniture and textiles to England. In the 1960s he was considered to be a style-defining figure and, together with the art dealer Robert Fraser , whom he had met in Eton, was the inventor of Swinging London. Supposedly he brought flared trousers , printed shirts and caftans fashionable. He was the editor of the shopping guide for the quarterly edition of Men in Vogue , the first edition of Vogue magazine for men, published between 1965 and 1970.

In the early 1960s, Gibbs moved into the Lindsay House on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea , where the painter James McNeill Whistler and the art dealer Hugh Lane had already lived. His quarters became an important meeting place for the bohemian scene and served as a backdrop in the 1966 film Blow Up by Michelangelo Antonioni . It was also the site of a drug party for the poet Allen Ginsberg . Allegedly, Princess Margaret was among the guests admitted to the emergency room that night with a condition known as food poisoning .

Mick Jagger 1965

Gibbs was friends with the Rolling Stones . His origins from the upper class were of particular interest to Mick Jagger , who also wanted to become a gentleman . Gibbs was also present at Keith Richard's Redlands house in Sussex when police carried out a drug raid on the late afternoon of February 12, 1967 that led to Dangerous Drugs Act charges against Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser. The photographer Michael Cooper and Jagger's girlfriend at the time, Marianne Faithfull, were also present at the raid. George Harrison of the Beatles had left the house with his girlfriend Pattie Boyd before the police arrived .

Gibbs introduced Mick Jagger to Rupert Loewenstein in 1968 . Jagger was dissatisfied with the then Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein . Loewenstein then began advising Jagger and the Rolling Stones on financial matters and worked until 2007 as Managing Director of the Rolling Stones. Gibbs was the set designer for the film Performance . Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg played the leading roles in the 1970 film drama .

Davington Priory about 1910

1972 bought Gibbs Davington Priory , a former Benedictine monastery in the county of Kent , which had been built 1,153th From 1972 to 1975 there lived the eccentric dandy David Litvinoff defined by a 1975 overdose of pills suicide committed. In 1982 Gibbs sold the property. It is now owned by Bob Geldof .

Gibbs had been friends with John Paul Getty II since the 1960s and was one of the few who visited Getty regularly when he fell into a heavy heroin addiction after the death of his wife Talitha Getty in 1971 . Gibbs was instrumental in Getty donating £ 50 million to London's National Gallery in 1985 . After Getty's death in 2003, Gibbs became chairman of the J. Paul Getty Jr. Charitable Trust , which was established to manage Getty's estate . He was also a trustee of the American Friends of the National Gallery , advisor to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a member of the National Trust's art committee .

Hans Holbein: Thomas Wyatt the Younger (1540–1542)

In 1974 Gibbs bought a painting from Christie's auction house for £ 2,800 , which was supposed to depict Thomas Wyatt and which, after thorough research, was later attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger . In 2006 the auction house Sotheby’s put the painting up for sale at an estimate of £ 2 to 3 million. However, Tate Britain questioned the authenticity, after which the picture could not be sold at the auction. In 2007 it was offered at the art fair The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht for a price of 10 million US dollars after the TEFAF committee had checked and confirmed the authenticity again.

In 2000, Gibbs sold the Manor House in Oxfordshire , which was built in the 1840s for his family. After his mother's death in 1980, he took over the house. The property's furniture was auctioned by Christie's. In 2006 Gibbs moved to Tangier , Morocco, where he bought a large piece of land with a house that had previously belonged to the painters Marguerite and James McBey. Here he lived with his life and business partner Peter Hinwood , a former actor known for his role as Rocky Horror on the Rocky Horror Picture Show , who now worked as an antique dealer and designer .

Gibbs died presumably of heart failure in his Tangier home on the day of his 80th birthday .

literature

• Thomas W. Hodgkinson: How to be Cool: The 150 Essential Idols, Ideals and Other Cool S ***. Icon Books, London 2016, ISBN 9781785782626 .
• Angelika Taschen (Ed.): Living in Morocco. Taschen, Cologne 2018, ISBN 9783836568197 , pp. 442–457.

Web links

• The New York Times : Christopher Gibbs, Avatar of Swinging London, dies at 80
• The Art Newspaper: Christopher Gibbs: the man who brokered £ 50m Getty grant to the National Gallery
• Gibbs Family Tree: Christopher Henry Gibbs

Individual evidence

1. ↑ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3653741/Art-sales-Old-Masters-new-records.html (02/23/2019)
2. ↑ https://www.economist.com/news/2007/03/16/the-party-of-the-century (02/23/2019)