The guitar-strumming philanthropist

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has one of theworld’s best art collections but is without a family to inherit it. Where will it go, asks Blake Gopnik

SIT with Paul Allen in his office in Seattle and you might take him for the head of a middling actuarial firm. He is 59 and pear-shaped, in black slacks, a white shirt, and blue tie, with his hair cut short above nondescript glasses. His aggressive banality comes as a shock, given his outsize résumé.

He’s the “Idea Man”, (self-styled, as per his autobiography), who helped Bill Gates found Microsoft and walked away with billions early on. He’s the man who had such a passion for Jimi Hendrix that he built a Frank Gehry museum to house his Hendrixiana.

He funded the first commercial manned flight into space, has owned sports teams, cavorted with athletes, and jammed with rockers on his various estates and yachts.

But in his office in Seattle, you might need to be an art critic to get a whiff of his status and wealth. Look around and you spot two gorgeous Calders on a table nearby. Glance through a door and you see one of Rodin’s casts of The Thinker; walk through it and you take in Giacometti’s bronze Femme de Venise, worth maybe $5m, as well as a lovely Monet landscape that could have cost several times that.

You might also recall the glorious Rothko, glowing in orange and yellow, that you passed on the way to the interview. It has been brought in from Allen’s home as the backdrop for this story’s portrait shoot. It’s a canvas now worth something like $80m, protected from stray elbows by a row of $12 pylons in safety orange. (They go rather well with the Rothko.)

There’s more wealth here, in these few square feet, than many millionaires amass in a lifetime, and the artwork in sight is only a small part of Allen’s hoard.

This legendary nerd is also an artsy who spends a fair part of his $15bn fortune on cultural goods — both as treats for himself and for others.

“Some of these things you’re so taken with that you find it pretty amazing that you could have something like that in your home, and enjoy it every day,” says Allen.

“That’s a pretty amazing thing. On the other hand, you feel that it’s better to loan these things out.”

With no great fanfare, the secretive collector has started to circulate his treasures to the public — a philanthropic morsel that is part of a larger program of kindness to the arts that has stretched to more than $100m. This week, the group called Americans for the Arts honoured Allen with its philanthropy prize.

Last year, the Chronicle of Philanthropy named Allen the nation’s most generous living donor; he beat George Soros and Michael Bloomberg and has been on its top 50 list for a decade.

In 2010, Allen pledged to give away at least half his fortune, after a nudge from his school pal Bill Gates. Most of the money is likely to go to his many science causes, which have already sucked up something like a billion Allen dollars.

And then there’s the part of Allen’s wealth that has been transmuted into art, which, in a classic philanthropic move, could get passed on to museums. Allen is on all the “great collector” lists, but the details of what he owns are murky.

“I know nothing,” says a New York art adviser normally in the know. “It’s locked up tight. I haven’t seen a level of privacy so intense, and so maniacal.” Allen is known for his nondisclosure agreements; his employees should have “No comment” tattooed on their foreheads, to save journalist’s time.

So his staff seems pleased that Allen himself chooses to make some disclosures. He mentions that he began his collecting with antiquities. It moved forward to the Renaissance and a beautiful Madonna by Sandro Botticelli, which he’s already lent out. And of course he’s got Impressionists: toney pictures such as Monet’s great Rouen Cathedral: Afternoon Effect, as well as a Renoir painting of a woman reading that last sold for $13m. Both of these, as well as a $40m Gauguin and a lovely pointillist Seurat, were in a show of 28 Allen works in his Seattle music museum, Experience Music Project.

The collection comes more up to date with that 1956 Rothko, and with contemporary works that Allen now mentions, such as a canvas covered in spots by Damien Hirst.

Allen credits his art interest to his parents: a father at the University of Washington library and a mother who loved books and taught school in Seattle.

But his great “cultural” awakening came in 1967, when he heard ’Are You Experienced?’ on a friend’s record player and had his mind blown by Hendrix.

Allen’s mother gave her teenager a $5 electric guitar, which he struggled to master.

He says he has never stopped strumming, occasionally alongside celebrity musicians such as Mick Jagger and Bono.

Allen says he made the move towards visual art only after Microsoft went public in 1986, and his vast holdings in the company’s stock helped make him, for a while, the world’s fifth-richest person.

Allen is now ‘very, very much in tune with what’s happening in the art world’, according to Tom Venditti, the curator who helps Allen tend his collection and lend it out.

Venditti says that more than 300 Allen works have gone out so far, to 47 different venues, and that the pace of lending is building. As well as a vast art collection, he has other minor interests.

These include electric guitars and rock-and-roll curios, vintage technology and scientific equipment, science-fiction illustrations and props, (Venditti says he helped Allen acquire Captain’s Kirk’s first command chair from Star Trek, now on view in the science-fiction museum that Allen has installed in the basement of his shrine to Hendrix.)

And then there are the dozens of old war planes for which Allen has built yet another home, on an airfield near Seattle.

Like all the rest of Allen’s assets since he took the Gates/Buffett pledge, his art is fair game for future donation, especially since he has never married or had kids.

“With the health issues I’ve had, I’ve had to think about it maybe more than some people that are my age,” says Allen. In 2009, he was diagnosed with a brutal lymphatic cancer. (He’d had a bout with a different form of it in 1982, which helped push him to leave Microsoft the next year). The latest drugs put his disease into remission, and if you ask Allen how his health is now, he utters a sotto voce ‘fine, fine’. But the cancer and its treatment has clearly taken a toll: One hour’s conversation seems to exhaust him, and he leaves the room walking like a much older man.

While the disposal of his cash is well advanced, what will happen to his art collection is less clear. Allen says he doesn’t like donating where others have already and points out that the world hardly needs another art museum.

* Blake Gopnik writes about art and design for Newsweek and The Daily Beast.