FEATURES ARCHIVE

“I felt that artists were dealing with aspects of our society and our culture and things that we saw in a way that films were not, and it seemed to be much more modern and up to date. I wondered what would happen if I had the pictures around me while I was working.” - Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton was a Renaissance man. While most people knew him as a writer of such scientific thrillers as Jurassic Park, Rising Sun and State of Fear, he was also a film director, medical doctor and passionate art collector. In the early 1970s, Crichton became acquainted in Los Angeles with a pantheon of artists that included Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg. In particular Crichton developed a close friendship with Jasper Johns. As a mark of their mutual respect, in 1977 he was asked to write the catalogue for Johns’ major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. The star of the Collection is Jasper Johns’ Flag, one of the most famous icons of 20th Century art, which was acquired by Crichton directly from Johns over 30 years ago. Along with other seminal paintings by Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol, as well as contemporary works by Andreas Gursky, Richard Prince and Jeff Koons, Michael Crichton assembled an extraordinary collection whose breadth, beauty and quality demonstrate the passion and quiet dedication he brought to his collecting.

Watch a video about this collection with Christie’s Deputy Chairman of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Brett Gorvy, who joins Sherri Crichton, Michael Ovitz and Ken Tyler in sharing a personal exploration of Crichton as a collector.

Read In Search of an Artist: "Gray is my Favorite Color", an abridged transcript of Michael Crichton’s final lecture on Jasper Johns at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 2008.