Peter Watson (art collector)

Peter Watson (born September 14, 1908 , † May 3, 1956 in London , England ) was an English art collector and patron .

Life

Peter Watson was born the third child of Sir William George Watson, 1st Baronet (1861–1930). His father had made a considerable fortune as a margarine producer, acquired the large country estate of Sulhamstead House in Sulhamstead Abbots , Berkshire , and was made a baronet in 1912 . Peter's older brother Norman James Watson (1897-1983) inherited this title in 1930.

Peter Watson attended the prestigious Eton College and studied - without success or final - two years at St. John's College of Oxford University . There he met WH Auden , Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender .

From 1930 he was able to dispose of the income from his extensive fortune and led a life as a playboy . He was interested in art and acquired numerous works by contemporary painters and sculptors, including those by Pablo Picasso , Joan Miró , Paul Klee and Salvador Dalí . He also financially supported young artists such as Lucian Freud , Francis Bacon and John Craxton .

Watson stood by his homosexuality from the start : he toured Europe with the costume and set designer Oliver Messel . In Vienna he met the photographer Cecil Beaton , who fell into love with him. Peter Watson felt friends for him, traveled with him around the world and promoted him, but he did not allow a love affair. For his part, Watson fell in love with the American Denham Fouts in Berlin, who was part of the Berlin demi-world of his time. Fouts was a drug addict, lavish, and always surrounded by wealthy lovers (later Truman Capote would be among them). In 1938 Watson bought an apartment in Paris for himself and Fouts ,

When the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, Peter Watson went to England and left his Parisian paintings to a Romanian art critic named Sherban Sidery, from whose hand they came to the Nazis. Watson himself was involved in London in the years to come for the literary and art magazine Horizon , which he published together with Cyril Connolly and initially with Stephen Spender . Connolly did the literary part, Watson was responsible for art contributions and art-related articles. He also financed the project.

After the end of the war he supported the establishment of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). His interest in the ICA was one of the reasons he gave up Horizon in 1950 . As a curator of the ICA, he initiated exhibitions by Francis Bacon, Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta . He continued to travel a lot, albeit less luxuriously than before the war because of the foreign exchange restrictions in the UK. He had varying relationships, including with the Americans Waldemar Hansen and Norman Fowler. His relationship to the art of the post-war era cooled off, he rejected abstraction and expressionism , became melancholy and withdrew more and more from social life.

On May 3, 1956, his partner Fowler alerted the London police that Watson had locked himself in the bathroom and was not responding to calls. When the police opened the door, Watson was found dead. The autopsy revealed death by drowning with no evidence of suicide or homicide. Since Fowler and Watson had recently quarreled and Fowler would have been strong enough to open the bathroom door without police help, rumors lingered that he had killed Watson. Fowler inherited Watson's fortune, quickly sold all of the works of art and books and moved to the Caribbean, where he died in 1968 - also in the bathroom by drowning.

Sources and literature

• Michael Prodger: 'Queer Saint' Peter Watson left his mark on British culture by bankrolling artworld giants. In: The Independent , April 29, 2015, online
• Adrian Clark: Peter Watson, Francis Bacon and the ICA. on-line
• Hilton Kramer: Cyril Connolly's 'The Horizon'. In: The New Criterion, September 1989, online
• Portal at 20th Century British and Irish Art
• Adrian Clark, Jeremy Dronfield: Queer Saint: The cultured life of Peter Watson. John Blake Publishing, London, ISBN 978-1-78418600-5 .