November 2008

In this month's issue

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

Archive

What has become a vast and highly focused enterprise sprang from modest roots. ‘I had no idea what I was doing when I began collecting,’ muses Khalili. With characteristic linguistic flourish he continues: ‘I was a dreamer. I started off with a pack of seeds thinking I might have a nice garden. I had no idea it would grow into a forest.’ He could also never have imagined the part this forest would come to play in furthering the understanding between East and West. However, his early life provided a key, for Nasser David Khalili grew up a Jew in a Muslim country. He was born in 1945 in Isfahan, Iran, into a dynasty of antiques dealers, and from the age of eight would accompany his father on buying expeditions. In 1967 he left for New York to take a degree in computer science. He spent a great deal of time looking at Islamic material in museums and began to deal, keeping the best objects for himself. After he met his future wife, Marion, he moved to London in 1978, where he began channelling profits into property. He gave up dealing long ago (and took a PhD in Qajar lacquer), but his acumen in buying both art and property has propelled him up the world’s rich lists.

Khalili is nothing if not prescient. When he began buying Islamic art in the 1970s it was inexpensive and there were few rivals. Serious buyers could be counted on one hand: Sheikh Nasser Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah of Kuwait; the David Collection in Copenhagen; London-based Edmund de Unger; Kuwaiti Jasim al-Homaizi; and the Iranian oil magnate Hashem Khosrovani. Prices were brought still lower by the Iranian revolution in 1979 and a dip in the Turkish art market, and Khalili bought deeply – and discreetly. The fabulously rich Sultan of Brunei, whom he has advised, entered late into the fray, as did Sheikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar, whose high-profile, multi-million-pound spending sprees sent prices for Islamic art spiralling in the mid ’90s.

Even within the Islamic field, Khalili was always buying ahead of fashion, and his other collections also feature works that were ‘overlooked and misunderstood’. Most notable is that of the technically astounding but – to many – aesthetically challenging 19th- and early-20th-century metalwork, enamels, lacquer and ceramics from Imperial Japan. Comprising over 2,000 pieces, it is the greatest collection of Meiji decorative art in the world, published in nine volumes in 1995-96. There followed the only extensive collection of Swedish flatweaves (Fig. 4) outside the country, and an unrivalled collection of the Spanish damascene metalwork of the Zuloaga family.

‘There was no point in collecting anything like Old Masters, porcelain or modern art’, Khalili explains. ‘These areas have all been covered already and with all the money in the world you could not create anything exceptional. I buy something because it is displaced from history and deserves to be recognised.’ He has a knack of buying material that only subsequently makes sense as a group. His latest coup is a group of textiles in exceptional condition relating to Mecca and Medina, which, with pieces acquired decades earlier, now form an even more important holding than that at the Topkapi Palace.