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- Art & Design
Roy Lichtenstein’s, Girl in Mirror, 1964.
Art, Drugs, And Rock ’N’ Roll
November 2010
Math whiz Max Palevsky was the original rocker tech geek. A computer
pioneer, he invested in a little start-up called Intel; he also backed
Rolling Stone magazine and went on to collect art, support Democratic
politicians, and, um, party. (The worst part of having had four heart
attacks, he told a friend, was that his doctor wouldn’t let him drop
acid anymore.) Palevsky, who died in May at 85, had houses in Beverly
Hills, Malibu, and Palm Springs, each architecturally unique and stocked
with some of the best examples of Arts and Crafts furniture,
not to
mention artworks by Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, and Richard
Lindner, among others. Palevsky’s wide-ranging collection—more than 250
pieces, from antiquities to contemporary art—goes on the block
in a
series of auctions at Christie’s this month and offers
a peek into the
tech innovator’s twin obsessions with
the machine age and the
one-of-a-kind. “He was constantly exploring the human figure and the
effects of mechanization and industrialization,” says Marc Porter,
chairman of Christie’s Americas. Highlights include Léger’s pivotal 1921
painting, La Tasse de Thé, which depicts
a voluptuous woman sipping
tea; Roy Lichtenstein’s 1964 Pop art classic, Girl in Mirror;
and Frank Stella’s 1961 gridlike painting, Telluride.
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