Clive Davis: How the icon-maker used his exceptional eye for talent to build a remarkable art collection

Aerosmith’s 1979 song ‘No Surprize’ is a fitting testament to the legend of Clive Davis, expressing the enormity of the larger-than-life music executive's impact on the band's success — and that of so many others. With his golden ear, Davis had a natural knack for spotting hits and unearthing talent. As the world’s most visible star-maker for half a century, he discovered Barry Manilow and Whitney Houston and guided the careers of legendary bands and singers across rock, hip-hop, and R&B. Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys and Jennifer Hudson are just some of the many artists who signed with Davis, who started as a young lawyer with Columbia Records before founding Arista Records, then J Records. Davis concluded his career as the longstanding Chief Creative Officer for Sony Music, heralded as the greatest record producer who ever lived.

As one of the few people in the industry without formal music education, Davis changed the face of popular music through his incredible ear and powerful intuition. ‘Working with Barry Manilow or Gil Scott-Heron, Whitney Houston or Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen or Alicia Keys — each of those artists had a remarkable contribution to make, and it was very fulfilling to help them realize their vision,’ Davis writes in his autobiography. ‘I’ve loved working with both artists and executives, helping to create timeless music.’

The record executive, who died in 2026, employed these same skills as he assembled an exceptional collection of contemporary art. Sara Friedlander, Christie’s chairman of post-war and contemporary art, notes, ‘This very discernment and prescience in his musical discoveries was equally applied in collecting fine art: the same instincts and intuition guided him to acquire numerous works by the most seminal visual artists of his generation.’ This November, Christie’s will present The Clive Davis Collection, an exceptional grouping of works from the executive’s personal collection. The collection includes works by Frank Stella, Joan Mitchell, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jean Dubuffet, George Condo, Fernando Botero and more, alongside remarkable portraits of Davis’s notable friends like Aretha Franklin and David Hockney by Andy Warhol.

One of Davis’s first acquisitions was Frank Stella’s mesmeric Attica II, an exceptional example from the artist’s seminal Concentric Squares series. First begun in the 1960s, Stella revisited his motif in the late 1970s in order to return to his foundational painterly praxis. As Stella noted, ‘The Concentric Squares created a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard. Their simple, humbling effect — almost a numbing power — became a sort of “control” against which my increasing tendency in the Seventies to be extravagant could be measured.’ Davis installed the painting pride of place in his weekend home in Pound Ridge, northwest of New York City. ‘It’s like the house was designed around this painting,’ Davis noted, the potency of the painting’s rhythm and verve heightened by its interaction with the modernist home’s austere elegance.

Portraits of icons

Other masterpieces Davis acquired over the years are intimate revelations into the music executive’s many friendships. Andy Warhol’s portrait Aretha Franklin, one of the artist’s last works, is a portal into Davis’s relationships with two of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century. Davis and Franklin shared a historic forty-year professional collaboration since 1980, when the Queen of Soul signed to Davis’s Arista Records. The two soon established a deep personal friendship as Davis helped Franklin orchestrate a massive career resurgence, crowned by the singer’s triumphant eponymous studio album Aretha, released in 1986. For the cover of the album, Franklin asked Davis if he thought Andy Warhol might agree to do a portrait of her. Davis had first met Warhol in the mid-1970s, introduced by Patti Smith and Lou Reed. Davis was subsequently invited by Warhol’s assistant Bob Colacello to a lunch with Warhol, where the three traded gossip from the worlds of art and music.

After the lunch, Davis recalls in his autobiography, ‘I called Bob and said, “Okay, what’s the verdict? Did we have a good time at lunch?” Without missing a beat, Bob replied, “Andy told me he had a fantastic time! He got such a kick out of the conversation, and all of the gossip and information we shared. Anytime you want to have lunch with him, just say the word. He would love to see you again.”’ Warhol immediately agreed when Davis asked him to make Franklin’s portrait. ‘Both Aretha and I loved it,’ Davis recalled, and the painting served as an exceptional monument to Franklin’s successful reinvention as a singer as well as Davis’s treasured relationship with Warhol. 

Another Warhol portrait, David Hockney, demonstrates another significant relationship, both vis-à-vis the two artists as well as between Hockney and Davis. One of only three examples, the portrait is an exceptionally rare work from 1974, when the artist produced celebrated silkscreens of luminaries including Brigitte Bardot and Valentino Garavani. The two artists were introduced by their mutual friend, the influential curator Henry Geldzahler, and Warhol was soon photographing the young Englishman in his Paris studio. ‘David came out looking young and sweet,’ Warhol recorded in his diaries. The portraits were done as part of a trade, and Hockney soon produced his own portrait of Warhol. Hockney likewise painted a portrait at the behest of Davis when the music executive was being honored and inducted into the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery at the museum’s 2022 Portrait of a Nation Gala. Davis had been friends with Hockney for years and travelled to the painter’s studio in Normandy to sit for the portrait that year.

An eye for collecting

Aside from the portraits, Hockney’s expansive, vibrant late landscape Hawthorne Blossom, Woldgate No. 4 crowns Davis’s collection. Painted in 2009, the work revels in Hockney’s rich verdant greens and flowing natural forms. The artist had returned to his native East Yorkshire and spent weeks wandering across the expanses of his homeland’s landscape, reminiscing on memories from childhood. Recalled memories and emotional serendipity are witnessed in the waves of bright pastel color and curling trees, which Hockney diligently records with his brush through his idiosyncratic perspectival effects.  

Hockney’s earliest painterly forays were deeply influenced by Jean Dubuffet, whose La Flibuste crowned Davis’s New York duplex. Four contorted figures appear out of the French artist’s characteristic red and blue crosshatching that distinguishes Dubuffet’s renowned L’Hourloupe cycle. Dubuffet first conceived of L’Hourloupe in 1962, the year prior to creating the present work, establishing a complete rupture from the stylistic principles and iconographies with which his oeuvre had previously been preoccupied. La Flibuste reveals the Art Brut artist’s desire to create an artificial world of his own imagining. This adventurous aspect is embraced in the work’s title, which translates to ‘buccaneering.’ Dubuffet was fascinated with the eccentric and humorous titles which he chose for his paintings, and was particularly fond of La Flibuste, choosing the motif for two later works: Couinquet La Flibuste and Dédé La Flibuste.  

Painted the year of her death, Joan Mitchell’s Untitled from 1992 serves as a fitting capstone to Davis’s collection. The intense blue dominating the upper half of the composition is a hallmark of Mitchell’s later oeuvre, expressing her devotion to l’heure des bleus, the period of twilight when the sun’s lingering rays cast a blue sheen upon her beloved French countryside. While the American artist faced growing tribulations in the last years of her life, struggling with her health while despairing over the losses of many friends and family members, her artistic powers attained a new peak, each brushstroke achieving a poignancy and emotive impact. Untitled bears the emotional traces of Mitchell’s many trials, lyrically composing her feelings into paint. Mitchell related her practice to music, eloquently explaining that ‘people paint or write music because they can’t express some things with words.’

Across his celebrated career at the vanguard of the music industry, Clive Davis employed his golden ear to discover and nurture the greatest musical talents of the last century. Davis’s natural knack for spotting talented artists was not limited to his own industry: The collection which he meticulously assembled over decades elucidates his singular ability to identify hits and build compelling ensembles of resonant voices. The Clive Davis Collection harmoniously unites timeless masterpieces into a chorus of distinctive voices, each bearing witness to his singular eye and ear for talent and enduring commitment to artistic excellence.