Elaine Wynn eyes the bigger picture

By Jori Finkel, New York Times News Service

Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015 | 2 a.m.

LOS ANGELES — At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on an unusually humid day last month, the museum’s director, Michael Govan, was consulting the new co-chairwoman of his board of trustees about another sticky situation — of the public relations variety.

After years of advocacy led by Govan and Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, President Barack Obama had just declared a sweep of Nevada desert a national monument to protect some 700,000 acres — including artist Michael Heizer’s vast earthwork “City” — from interventions such as mining. But Republican politicians criticized the designation, and Govan said the artist was upset about the bad press.

The co-chairwoman, Elaine Wynn, listened attentively before offering Govan a bit of advice: “I always think it’s best to let these kinds of things sit. We don’t want to overreact.”

Known for being more even-keeled than her headline-grabbing former husband, Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino mogul and blue-chip art collector, Elaine Wynn is now lending her diplomacy and financial support to the museum, sharing the chairman role with her fellow billionaire Antony Ressler.

In the process, she is stepping out of her ex-husband’s shadow and establishing a reputation as an arts patron and collector in her own right, helped by a net worth Forbes puts at $1.58 billion. “She’s dedicated and has good judgment,” Ressler said. “I share her interests in business, basketball, K-12 education and the arts.” But, he added, “she is a much more committed collector than I am.”

Songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, who is also on the museum’s board, added, “She’s always been passionate about art, but now she’s finally free to explore her own interests in a way she couldn’t as part of a couple.”

For an interview, which took place in a museum boardroom, Wynn discussed publicly for the first time her record-smashing $142.4 million acquisition in 2013 of a Francis Bacon triptych of painter Lucian Freud. She also spoke about the division of art assets in her 2010 divorce, the financial terms of which have already been scrutinized for their impact on Wynn Resorts, a company she co-founded.

Wynn called the Bacon portrait of Freud a work of “extraordinary power and beauty” and a natural companion to two paintings already in her collection: one by Bacon, purchased post-divorce, and a major self-portrait by Freud, “The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer,” bought beforehand, in 2005.

For the Bacon triptych, Wynn paid well beyond the $85 million Christie’s had anticipated, as five other bidders fought her for it.

“I was captivated by the story of this intense friendship” between two creative giants who had, she put it mildly, “terrible personal habits” (for example, alcohol and sex addictions). She also had an intense reaction upon first seeing the work in person. “I was gobsmacked. I was afraid I wasn’t going to own it — I’ve never had a reaction like that before.”

As for the initial secrecy surrounding the purchase, she explained that she felt it could be dangerous to trumpet the purchase. “For me it was something to celebrate quietly with myself rather than have it splashed about in the news,” said Wynn, whose family has been targeted before by criminals. Her eldest daughter was kidnapped in 1993 at age 27. (Without alerting the police, Steven Wynn quickly paid a $1.45 million cash ransom and secured her release.)

Elaine Wynn, who now splits her time among Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York, identifies herself as a philanthropist more than as a collector.

“I have some spectacular things I own, but that’s not the credential that I think is important. The Madame Bountiful title doesn’t sit so comfortably on me,” she said, explaining that she considers herself a “steward” of her artworks, especially the Bacon. “I’m going to donate it to a museum of my choice before I go to the craps game in the sky,” she said. “LACMA will certainly be prominently considered, but there are others on my list.”

Wynn draws a distinction between her own “instinctive” buying and relentless mega-collectors like Steve Wynn, famous for snapping up works in the 1990s by such artists as Rembrandt, Renoir and Picasso, mainly for their corporate collection at the Bellagio. “Steve was the driving force,” she said, “he’s the compulsive character. But his passion has always been infectious, so I got caught up in it.”

One of her contributions was the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art itself. Originally, Steve Wynn talked about hanging art throughout the hotel and casino, but she steered him away: “I wondered how in the world we would protect it. And it’s like putting a Renoir in Disneyworld.”

When they sold the Bellagio’s parent company, Mirage Resorts, in 2000, most art went with it. The rest, from their personal collection, was divided during their divorce. “There was no tug of war,” she said, in part because their tastes had diverged. While Steve Wynn kept the Picassos, her picks included a striking 1880 Manet pastel of a coolly poised young woman, Suzette Lemaire, and a large, abstract painting by Joan Mitchell. Wynn also has a soft spot for textile-based work and, in 2011, bought an “ethereal” Jim Hodges silk-flower curtain.

The Wynns’ youngest daughter, Gillian Wynn, calls the Mitchell her favorite, noting it has qualities she sees in her mother: “It’s full of life and color, beautiful and balanced. It has an inherent femininity but is also strong and confident.”

A onetime art history major at Yale, Gillian Wynn recalled her mother’s bringing her to galleries as a child. In turn Gillian Wynn takes credit for bringing her mother to the Clark Art Institute in 2003 to see J.M.W. Turner’s late seascapes, radical in their churning, fiery abstraction.

Three years later, her parents spent $35.8 million at Christie’s on a Turner of their own: a golden painting of skiffs in a Venice canal, “Giudecca, la Donna Della Salute and San Giorgio,” which Elaine Wynn says hints at Turner’s later work with its shocks of red. “It’s one of the only pictures that Steve let us buy without seeing it himself. Selling that painting is my biggest regret,” she said.

She was invited to join the board of the Los Angeles County museum in 2011. At first, she said, she was hesitant because of her commitment to education: She is national chairwoman of the anti-truancy K-12 group Communities in School. “I don’t do things halfway,” she said. But a museum trustee, Bobby Kotick, the president of Activision Blizzard, offered to sponsor her first year by writing a six-figure check. “He said he was going to pay my dues. How could I refuse?”

The first project she helped to fund at the museum was “Levitated Mass,” the 340-ton monolithic boulder-sculpture by Heizer. Wynn also helped support Heizer’s life’s work, the system of earthen forms known as “City,” financially and by campaigning for national monument status.

“He’s the quintessential Nevada artist, this rugged individual steeped in the geology of our state, doing amazing things in the desert,” Wynn said. “I understood it as something the state of Nevada could be proud of beyond what it’s known for — beyond the artifice.”

Now her priority with Ressler — what Bayer Sager calls “their biggest challenge” — is to begin fundraising for Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s plan, not yet finalized, to reinvent the museum’s campus by replacing three aging buildings with one low-slung structure that stretches over Wilshire Boulevard.

Architecture critic Joseph Giovannini has attacked the plans as “space-guzzling” and “wasteful” — all formalism and little function, with a price tag that could approach $1 billion. But Wynn praised the design for working “to remove the marble pillars and notions of elitism to become more open, friendly, inviting architecturally.”

Once known as the “Queen of Las Vegas,” Wynn is clearly not afraid of playing the odds. While other museums go with brand name architects, Zumthor has not completed any public buildings in the U.S . In Wynn’s words, Zumthor is “very precious — I mean special and limited and not already overblown and celebrated beyond what he deserves.”

“It’s very risky,” Wynn acknowledged. “We’re going to live or die by this choice.”