The sale of Smurfit Group's art next week will draw a bevy of bidders - with Michael Smurfit tipped to be first in line, writes Kathy Sheridan.
Mrs St George was a fine, strapping, long-legged woman, to judge by William Orpen's portrait. Daughter of a fabulously wealthy banker known as The Sphinx of Wall Street, lover of Orpen and brazen enough to decorate herself with a Galway rosary beads while posing for him during their passionate affair in Costelloe, Co Galway, this was a real mistress, says art expert Ciaran MacGonigal. "Like the Pompadour, she had money, breeding, knew the art of the boudoir."
Men nurture fantasies about such a creature. It must have rankled with Michael Smurfit to see her reduced to a "non-core" asset, when the Jefferson Smurfit Group was taken over by Madison Dearborn. The great 10 x 8 foot empty space she once occupied in the K Club must surely taunt him. Significantly, the wall remains bare, faithful even in long absence.
The smart money is on Smurfit swooping in to re-claim her at Sotheby's in London next Friday when she goes on sale for an estimated €740,000-1,030,000, and perhaps a few others among the first 10 Smurfit Group paintings going under the hammer with her. A further 12 of the group's paintings will be sold through Sotheby's next year and possibly a similar number subsequently.
All this suggests that Michael Smurfit cares about art - beyond its contribution to the bottom line. However, there are plenty in the Irish art world who would dispute that. "From what I know, he'd prefer to read the profit and loss rather than the catalogues,"says one.
But Ciaran MacGonigal insists that far from being the passive paymaster for a collection assembled by minions, Smurfit was so intimately involved that when a desired picture was up for auction, "he would arrange for someone to bid, then for someone to watch the bidder, then for someone to watch the watcher. He kept several sets of valuations and would cross-reference them and would know every detail".
But does that not confirm his obsession with the bottom line? "He would not buy something that he didn't like," says MacGonigal. A clear-sighted, former associate remarks, "There is no question that when he buys, he has a mind to investment . . . But he does appreciate art. He will carefully consider where it should be placed and will notice if it has been moved."
By all accounts, fewer than half the paintings in Smurfit HQ in Clonskeagh and the K Club in Co Kildare fall into the Madison Dearborn asset-strip. The bulk of the 500-plus paintings in the Smurfit collection are the personal property of Michael Smurfit, other family members and the Smurfit Foundation.
The collection - reckoned by MacGonigal to be worth about £70 million globally - has been in the gathering for nearly 30 years. She gets little credit for it but Norma Smurfit was "absolutely crucial", he says, in assembling the early two- to three-fifths of it and in moulding Michael's taste.
In later years, MacGonigal vividly remembers Smurfit's response to some Yeats paintings in Waddington's of London. "He was staying at the Ritz and we went to Dunhill's to collect cigars left to him by his brother Jeff, thousands of pounds worth of them. Then we went to view the pictures - and I can only believe that he fell in love with them on the spot. He seems to be quite a cold man, yet Yeats seemed to spark off an extraordinary reaction in him . . . I think it's the very strongly pigmented colour, those Yeatsian swirly things drew him in some way. Perhaps he saw something so turbulent in them, something that was the antithesis of what he appeared to be. He had the same reaction to Roderic O'Conor".
For all that, few can believe the entire project was not a monumental ego-finding expression in acquiring as many of the most expensive paintings in Ireland that it is possible to have, and to display them in the splendour of the K Club's Yeats Room. Other world-class movers and shakers would have had significant art collections so why not Smurfit?
"For Michael Smurfit, there is huge kudos in having an amazing representative collection of Irish painting and sculpture," says James O'Halloran of James Adam, which last year alone sold €7.3 million of the estimated €20 million sales of Irish art.
Call it ego or ambition on a admirable scale, but Smurfit out-collected them all. This is the same ego that had a mannequin prominently displayed in the K Club kitted out in a General Patton outfit, complete with brass plate testifying it had graced the doctor's bod at some fancy-dress ball; the ego which has had a hole named after him on the golf course that will host the Ryder Cup; the ego that reportedly keeps a personal decanter of Château Petrus for quaffing at dinner while bemused guests make do with a lesser vintage.
Smurfit has an image in Ireland of being arrogant, vulgar and rude, of being someone who will do anything to make a few bob. Is it a fair one, we ask a well-disposed old acquaintance, no mean businessman himself? Yes, is the bald reply. "On the other hand, I know plenty with far less and who have achieved far less than Michael has, and who are all those things and worse . . . Some people create and generate; others don't."
Indeed, some assert that much of that notoriously prickly, pushy, arrogant manner is down to bad presentation. "A lot of it is ignoring social graces and wanting to get on with it. It's a degree of material and financial success. But it's no real problem. Like all humanity, he is a complex being. He can also be a lively, friendly, affable individual. He is very loyal to people and they to him." Loyalty and huge generosity - much of it on a private, one-to-one basis - are qualities mentioned repeatedly.
A former chairman of Smurfit Ireland, and now chairman of the RTÉ Authority, Paddy Wright, once said he would walk "bollock naked down O'Connell Street" if Smurfit ordered him to.
"The friends and people around him go back a long, long time", says MacGonigal. "A man who is unreasonable does not keep all those people around him. You don't read of people being fired out of Smurfit. They remain discreet and loyal - his circle stays very tight."
Next thing we'll hear is that the Château Petrus story is a fiction . . . Well, not quite. One old dining companion concedes that the personal decanter story is true, but that it's only there so he can monitor his alcohol intake. It may not look good, but makes sense in an Emperor-of-the-Universe kind of way. He does much of his high-powered business over working dinners and, says our man carefully, it's "usually" the same wine as everyone else is drinking.
There is no doubt, however, say those who know him, that ego and arrogance have come further to the fore in recent years.
That very public unpleasantness - when appalled shareholders twigged he had raked in €6.6 million in 2000, a package not commensurate with company performance, is believed to have been the trigger for him to steer the company into private ownership, whatever the cost. Regardless of the resulting family windfall of over £200 million plus equity in exchange for its 10 per cent share, the emotional cost to a man obsessed with the family name and the memory of his parents, cannot be underestimated.
The company auctioned off to Madison Dearborn, an asset-stripping, Chicago venture capitalist last year, is the one founded by the father he worshipped, the one that Michael built up from a small box-maker in Walkinstown which almost went bust in the 1950s, to a world-class corporation worth over £2 billion. The Smurfit Group art collection also fell into the deal, along with upwards of eight homes around the world (well, Smurfit needs warms climes for his recurring back problem), his cherished K Club and much else.
How does an Emperor of the Universe cope with that? The word is that the K Club - its splendour multiplying with two championship golf courses and a more imposing entrance, satisfyingly secure for Queen Elizabeth if and when she comes to Ireland - will probably go on the market for anything between €100 million and €120 million after the Ryder Cup. Few insiders will be surprised to see Michael Smurfit emerge as chief bidder. Or to see him buy back the Jefferson Smurfit Group after a decent period of about, say, three years. Or to sense an interest or three from him next Friday at Sotheby's when the Smurfit Group collection begins its slow drip-feed into a rather nervous, and somewhat aggrieved art marketplace.
MacGonigal, who was instrumental in building parts of it, confesses his disappointment that it wasn't retained as a collection. "As well as that, the overhang from a sense that all those paintings are waiting to appear could affect and destabilise the market for years."
Year-long strenuous efforts were made by Dublin lord mayor and the Dublin city manager to retain the collection for the city, according to MacGonigal. "But it was at an awkward time when the city was moving Anna Livia [or the Floozie in the Jacuzzi], the statue in memory of his father - about which he was a bit taken aback - and the bids and counter-bids for the company were going on . . . It all petered out in the end."
Should we be getting upset about the break-up of the collection? "No", says James O'Halloran of James Adam, bluntly. "It hasn't been a collection for Ireland. It has been built up by an investment company. It's not like the man in the street has had access to them. This is commerce."
Nor does he believe there are any pictures among the 10 for auction next week that are pre-eminent, that the State should own. "The Orpen portrait of Mrs St George is the only major picture of those," he says. "The Yeats paintings are not major works." Le Brocquy's Travelling Woman with Newspaper, in his view the jewel of the collection, is not in this sale.
Is the National Gallery interested in acquiring any of these works? A spokeswoman says while the gallery is always interested in looking at anything from a collection or auction, "We wouldn't show our hand before the auction date".
The granting of the sale to Sotheby's of London, as opposed to an Irish house, rankles among auctioneers here. "The quality of product that we produce is on a par with London houses," says O'Halloran.
"Most of those pictures will in all likelihood be bought by Irish people, or by people in England who do business with us. Holding it there means that the sterling difference and buyers' premium - which is higher in London - leaves less for buyers to spend."
Jo Doidge-Harrison, Sotheby's director of the Irish sale, says the company was chosen because the chairman Henry Wyndham had "been working with Dr Smurfit . . . and we have been working on advising them on buying for the collection, so the relationship was there and in place". It's a fair bet, however, that a good many slighted folk around town would also have perceived themselves as "advisers".
In any event, Michael Smurfit's - or the Smurfit Group's - purchasing power is no longer around to gladden their wallets and there is no sign of anyone to match him. Some half a dozen Irish people are reckoned to have a million to a million and a half to spend annually on art - the kind of businessmen that few ever hear of, PLC bosses, builders, IT successes and, surprise, surprise, barristers - but none is nearly as colourful as the Hello!-ish Michael Smurfit.
Missing you already, General Patton.