Wendell Cherry

Wendell Cherry (born September 25, 1935 in Horse Cave , Hart County , † July 16, 1991 in Louisville ) was an American lawyer, entrepreneur, art collector and patron . Humana Inc. , a company he co-founded, grew under his leadership to become the largest hospital operator in the United States. He also built up one of the country's most important art collections in the 1980s.

Life

Youth and education

Wendell Cherry was born in 1935 to grocer Layman S. Cherry and his wife Geneva (nee Spillman) in Horse Cave, a rural Kentucky community. His siblings were Ruth Ann, Layman Jr., and Sue Allen Cherry. In Horse Cave he attended Caverna High School until 1953 before moving to the University of Kentucky in Lexington . Here he first studied business administration and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1957 . He finished his law studies in 1959 with a Bachelor of Laws . During this time he served as the editor-in-chief of the Kentucky Law Journal . He then taught business administration at the University of Louisville and worked as a lawyer in Louisville. There he met his future business partner and long-time friend David A. Jones (* 1932) in 1960.

The family

Wendell Cherry was married to Mary Elizabeth Baird from Munfordville . From this relationship the children Angela, Alison, Andrew and Hagan emerged. In his second marriage, he married the New York-born interior designer Dorothy Morton (nee O'Connell), who brought three children into the marriage. The couple lived in Louisville and New York.

The rise to become an entrepreneur and millionaire

Wendell Cherry and David A. Jones founded Extendicare Inc. in Louisville in 1961 . The company's founders initially operated a nursing home in Kentucky, which was followed by other facilities of this type in numerous other US states. Wendell Cherry initially acted as president of the company, then as deputy chairman of the board. The company later expanded into the hospital sector and grew to become the largest hospital operator in the United States. When the company went public in January 1968, the issue price per share was eight dollars and rose to 50 dollars in ten months. The fortunes of Wendell Cherry and David A. Jones, who each held 100,000 shares in the company, grew to several million dollars in that short time.

In 1972 the company separated from its 41 nursing homes, which were renamed Humana Inc. in 1974. Under the direction of Wendell Cherry, the company entered the health insurance market in the 1980s. The number of hospitals operated by Humana Inc. rose to over 90 and annual sales exceeded $ 2.5 billion. For the construction of the new company headquarters in Louisville, Humana Inc. commissioned the architect Michael Graves , whose Humana Building , a high-rise in the style of postmodernism , opened in 1985.

The promoter of sport

Sports enthusiast Wendell Cherry was part of a group of Louisville citizens in the 1960s who supported the heavyweight boxer later known as Muhammad Ali . Cherry worked as a lawyer for this group, which raised sponsorship money for the Louisville-born boxer who was then still fighting under the name Cassius Clay.

In 1969, Cherry bought the Kentucky Colonels basketball team along with his friend David A. Jones and Bill DeWitt, Stuart Jay, John Brown, Jr. and Mike Storen . Before reselling his shares in 1973, he served as President of the American Basketball Association for some time .

The art collector

In 1985, the American art magazine Arts & Antiques ranked Wendell Cherry among the 100 most important art collectors in the United States. The reputation of this collection arose not only because of the quality of the works, but also for the sometimes very high prices that Cherry paid for these pictures and achieved when they were later sold. Pablo Picasso's self-portrait Yo, Picasso is a record . Cherry bought the picture at auction in 1981 at Sotheby’s auction house for $ 5.3 million - at the time the highest amount ever paid for Picasso paintings. Cherry put the same picture up for auction at Sotheby's in May 1989 and received $ 47.9 million from the highest bidder, the Greek shipowner Stavros Niarchos - again the highest price for a work by Picasso and also the second highest price ever paid for a work of art.

The other top works in the collection included predominantly paintings by the French Impressionists , Austrian painters of the fin de siècle and works of classical modernism . These included La chanson du chien by Edgar Degas and roses in a glass vase by Édouard Manet, as well as Lady with a Fan by Gustav Klimt and Lovers by Egon Schiele or Jeanne Hébuterne (devant une porte) by Amedeo Modigliani , Four Girls on a Bridge by Edvard Munch and Le chasseur de chez Maxim’s by Chaim Soutine .

The Wendell Cherry collection also contained works by American artists such as Spanish Dancer by John Singer Sargent or individual works by earlier European schools such as Juive d'Alger by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot or the still life with flowers in a basket with two butterflies, a dragonfly , a fly and a beetle by the baroque painter Gerard van Spaendonck . Cherry and his wife Dorothy also collected furniture from the 18th century and other handicrafts that they used to furnish their homes. After Wendell Cherry died in 1991, his heirs put large parts of the art collection up for auction at an auction in 1994. In the following years, other works from the collection came onto the art market.

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  Gerard Van Spaendonck: Still Life with Flowers in a Basket with Two Butterflies, a Dragonfly, a Fly and a Beetle , 1787, private collection

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  Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: Juive d'Alger , around 1870, private collection

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  Édouard Manet: Roses in a Glass Vase , 1883, private collection

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  Amedeo Modigliani: Jeanne Hébuterne , 1919, private collection

The patron

In accordance with the wide range of interests, Wendell Cherry was committed to very different institutions. In 1990 he donated the painting Funeral of a Mummy by the American painter Frederick Arthur Bridgman to the Speed ​​Art Museum in Louisville, of which he was a member . He was one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts , which opened in 1983 . From 1980 to 1987 he was the board chairman of this institution. Together with his wife Dorothy and another donor, he gave this institution the painting Rite of Passage by Malcolm Morley . The same institution received the 1972 sculpture Personnage by the Spaniard Joan Miró as a gift from the couple Cherry together with their friends Betty and David A. Jones .

In the field of science, he donated 100,000 US dollars to the College of Law at the University of Kentucky, which thus established the H. Wendell Cherry Professor of Law , which was named after him . Two chairs in medicine at the University of Louisville are also dedicated to his memory. At the School of Medicine there , the Wendell Cherry Chair in Clinical Trial Research and The Wendell Cherry Chair in Cancer Translational Research remember him .

literature

• Glenn Fowler: Wendell Cherry Is Dead at 55 . Obituary in the New York Times on July 18, 1991. [1]
• John E. Kleber: The Encyclopedia of Louisville . University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2001, ISBN 0-8131-2100-0 .
• Sotheby's New York (Ed.): Property from the Estate of Wendell Cherry . Auction catalog Sale 6565, Sotheby's New York, New York 1994.

Web links

• Biography of Wendell Cherry / University of Kentucky (English)
• Glenn Fowler: Wendell Cherry Is Dead at 55 . Obituary in the New York Times (English)