The Very Personal Collections That 7 Artists Left Behind

In the late 1940s, canny designers transfigured a plastic previously used for warplanes into Lucite purses — cheeky Art Deco gadgets whose stiff lollipop handles allowed hardly anything inside. Robert Gottlieb, the publishing titan and New Yorker editor who championed writers including John le Carré and Margaret Atwood, first stumbled upon one of these souvenirs of booming extravagance in the early 1980s at a Manhattan flea market. A decades-long obsession took root. “He found them amusing, such impractical objects, then he kept finding more and more,” says his wife, the actress Maria Tucci. “It was the choosing and acquiring that was important to him. The delight of saving something.” (Writers and other houseguests understood their display over the bed in the master bedroom to typify Gottlieb’s zappy humor, though a confused child once asked Maria if she “used a different bag every night.”) “He loved working more than anything,” says his daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, a documentary filmmaker, “but on weekends when I was a kid he’d take me to flea markets, and we would look for his objects, and he knew the people at every stall.” She adds that her father found the purses “beautiful portals into how people lived at another time.” Gottlieb also greatly admired industriousness as a characteristic, Lizzie says; to that end, the man who midwifed the work of Robert Caro and Salman Rushdie also collected 3-D dog posters, obscure Barbie dolls and macramé owls.

Kwame Brathwaite, the photographer and activist whose ardent shots propelled civil rights conversations and helped birth the “Black is beautiful” movement of the 1960s, took his cues from music — channeling the intuitive precision of jazz riffs into his emotive portraits. As a bebop-loving teenager, Brathwaite organized political music shows in Harlem; by 21, he was photographing Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis in concert, and he would go on to shoot the Jackson 5 in Ghana, Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder at intimate birthday parties and a who’s who of Black icons, including seminal shots of Whitney Houston, Sly Stone and Nina Simone. The 700-odd vinyl records collected in his Harlem living room, a number of which feature album covers shot by Brathwaite himself, are a testament to how ardently the photographer, who taught himself to play the tenor saxophone, drew inspiration and a sense of belonging from the sound of song. “He would wake me up every morning to Bob Marley’s ‘Get Up, Stand Up,’” says his son, Kwame S. Brathwaite. “For him, in African diaspora culture, music is a really important piece of how we record what’s happening and how we talk about the things that are happening in the world — but also important as a way to celebrate.”

When she performed onstage in Las Vegas in the 1980s and 2010s, a glitter-laden Suzanne Somers liked to play the vampy, insouciant bombshell; offstage, she was “exactly the same person,” says her stepdaughter Leslie Hamel, who has also been the designer of Somers’s stage costumes since the mid-80s. Hamel recalls crystal-encrusted jumpsuits and gowns that dragged 45 pounds of glass beads as among her stepmother’s favorite outfits. Somers — who rose to fame with her portrayal of the riotously ditsy Chrissy Snow in “Three’s Company” — was “not a sweatpants person,” Hamel says. “She liked looking beautiful. She said she couldn’t even wear flat shoes, her feet were so arched. Her Manolos were her sneakers.” After she moved on from acting, Somers was also a sex-positive health mogul, author of two dozen books, consummate chef and scrupulous party hostess. “She wasn’t a performer putting on an act as a glamour girl,” Hamel says. “She was innately glamorous, in her soul.”

A Fernando Botero sculpture always started off about the size of a small cat — with soft, malleable clay warmed by the Colombian artist’s hands in the Tuscan studio where he spent his summers. From there, the artist grew them to fanciful size through a laborious process that involved having the clay figure recast in liquid plaster, meticulously contouring the new double, then sending it off to a foundry to be sealed in hulking bronze. Botero was not a man of many material possessions, yet he kept all his castoff plasters, storing these errant limbs and upturned cheeks — some of which were never turned into bronze, the artist having decided at the last minute to augment a head or twirl the tilt of an arm — in a warehouse a short drive from his studio. “There is a random way in which these plasters got stored, and that’s what’s beautiful: Only the person who stored them there actually knows which hand belongs to which sculpture,” says Lina Botero, the artist’s daughter. “Nothing could be moved, otherwise it’d be impossible to find.” Until his death at 91, Botero was still pacing his warehouse, fiddling with fresh ideas, reworking old ones. “I often told him to take a vacation, but there’s nothing that gave him more joy,” Lina says. “He said that, for him, working in his studio was like eating chocolate ice cream.”

Elvis and Liberace miniatures, chunks of petrified wood, lenticular photographs and bobbing lava lamps — including one of the largest ever made — are only a sliver of the mammoth collections that Paul Reubens, the comic mastermind behind the guileless character Pee-wee Herman, left behind. “He wouldn’t buy one of something, he’d buy five of them,” says the actor David Arquette, a longtime friend who would often go on road trips with Reubens to scour thrift stores and auctions. At one point, Reubens’s collections sprawled across 14 storage units. “He absolutely just collected and collected and collected,” the creative director Marc Balet recalls. “He would spend hours talking about it, showing you items — he was just obsessive about it, like he was obsessive about his work, about Pee-wee.” Balet continues: “I used to come out to L.A., and I’d stay in his spare bedroom. Then slowly, there was no spare bedroom anymore. It was chock-full of stuff.” Reubens, Arquette says, would hunt down the most “offbeat, kitschiest, weird, swirled-looking-faced” versions of toys and trinkets; the film producer Prudence Fenton, who worked with Reubens on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” called his collections a “mission to preserve Americana.”

Open the Great American Songbook to any random page, and you’ll be hard-pressed not to find Tony Bennett’s name somewhere on it. He performed in Times Square in the 1950s and would go on to croon tender duets with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Amy Winehouse to Christina Aguilera. In his tidy 15th-floor apartment overlooking Central Park — from which Bennett often gazed upon and painted the spirited strangers below — Bennett’s few possessions included his beloved collection of signed duet sheets. “He was very Zen-like, as he got older, and he didn’t like distractions, you know, you didn’t see any of his 20 Grammy Awards in there,” says Danny Bennett, Tony’s son and longtime manager. (The Grammys were relegated to Danny’s office instead.) In the later years, as Bennett’s Alzheimer’s disease worsened, “communication wasn’t the greatest; standing at the piano and singing brought him to life,” Danny says. On the day he died, Bennett asked his wife, Susan, what song she wanted to hear. She asked for “Because of You,” his very first No. 1 hit, from 1951. The 96-year-old stood in the crook of his grand piano and sang out all the lyrics, perfectly, from memory.

Carin Goldberg collected ephemera. A magnificently iterative graphic designer, she accumulated tree branches, sewing thread, tickets, billfolds, chipped cobblestones, jars of Roman aqueduct water; her houses and studios were shrines to the overlooked and abandoned. “Most of these things are worth almost nothing, which is part of their charm,” says Goldberg’s husband, the architect James Biber. “They’re detritus.” To Goldberg, though, what she called the “uncelebrated residue of culture” held unbridled depth: Erasers, for example, were utilitarian objects but also evocations of specificity, design manifestoes unto themselves and reminders of the deep significance and history of removal. Goldberg’s hundreds of collections served as inspiration for her design work. “They were raw materials for her,” Biber says. (As Goldberg herself once put it: “Curating enables me to remember, communicate, interpret and eventually conquer a place where I am unable to claim citizenship.”) “Sometimes I think they sat on the shelves waiting to be plucked and put into a piece of art,” Biber says. “They were artifacts until they were included in a piece of her design. Carin was an artist, and when she put anything on a shelf, when she collected it, it was art.”