The collection started almost by accident. It was 1980, and Tony
Podesta was bidding adieu to co-workers from Sen. Ted Kennedy’s
just-failed bid for the presidential nomination. On their way out the
door, staff members were handed whatever goodies remained — among them a
tube of limited-edition prints donated to the campaign by the likes of
Warhol and Rauschenberg.
A quarter-century later, those prints are history, but Podesta is
counted among the nation’s most important contemporary art collectors.
Inside the elite Chelsea galleries, he and his wife, Heather, are
gossiped about, deferred to and ushered toward the choicest works. All
the art stars know their names.
In Washington, the couple is recognized, too — for very different
reasons. Podesta, 60, has ridden a long career on Capitol Hill to his
current perch as a top-tier lobbyist and co-chairman of PodestaMattoon,
an outfit that took in $11 million in revenue last year from high end
clients such as Altria and eBay. (It counts among its clients The
Washington Post Co., which in 2003 paid the firm $60,000.)
Political candidates eagerly tap Podesta’s mojo, too: He spearheaded
President Clinton’s successful 1996 Pennsylvania campaign, and Sen. John
Kerry has hired him to work the same magic for him in the Keystone
State this year. Heather, 26 years his junior and several shades
greener, carved a career aiding Reps. Robert Matsui and Earl Pomeroy;
she joined Blank Rome’s law and government relations firm this spring.
Washington power brokers familiar with the couple’s art collection —
regular rounds of parties at their two Washington area homes ensure
plenty of viewing opportunities — regard the couple’s enthusiasm as
something of a personal quirk.
But the Podestas’ stock of artists know well the benefits of securing
such politically connected patronage. Uniquely capable of advocating
for their artists using the lobbying skills of their day jobs, Tony and
Heather can secure access, lend advice and connect artists to curators
and coveted museum shows. It’s backing more valuable, at times, than
dollars.
In a gray flannel city, Tony and Heather show up in technicolor. Tony
arrives in red leather shoes and peacock-bright ties. Stalk-slim
Heather, a white streak issuing from a shock of dark hair, favors
ensembles by international boutique designers.
When they buy, Tony and Heather buy big. At a given moment, their
collection hovers around 900 pieces, higher if a major art fair closed
recently. The emphasis is on photo-based works, though sculpture and
paintings are also featured.
With more than half their trove currently in storage, Tony and
Heather, like notable collectors Eli and Edythe Broad in Los Angeles and
Don and Mera Rubell in Miami, are considering buying a public space to
show their works. In the meantime, the couple sends as many pieces as
possible to traveling museum shows and displays the rest at home. In
their Woodley Park and Falls Church residences, pictures hang salon
style, floor to ceiling, like very, very expensive wallpaper. Tony
started buying art at the annual auctions of Washington Project for the
Arts — a local alternative art venue that was once a very hip place but
is hardly on par with today’s major galleries. Today, though his habit
has grown voluminously, Tony describes the evolution as more a dedicated
hobby than an obsession.
“Some people spend a lot of money on golf,” says Tony, who speaks in energetic spurts. “Like they play golf, I play art.”
His is, in part, a gambler’s collection, albeit based on safe bets.
The up-and-comers Tony favors travel the international contemporary art
circuit, the gold line from Chelsea to the Venice Biennale. Though the
works aren’t guaranteed to stand the test of time, many of his artists
have logged significant hours on major museum walls. Others, including a
few of Tony’s more obscure choices, have given good returns over the
long term.
Heather’s first taste of Tony’s art came on their first date, in the
fall of 2001, when they stopped at his house to pick up his car before
heading to the opera. Passing some of the quirkier selections, Heather
recalls Tony remarking, “I don’t know why it is, but I have artworks
where the women have no heads.” The next day, she sent him a note
signed, “Woman with a head.” They were married last year.
To keep themselves in pictures, Tony and Heather jet to art fairs and
biennials from Sao Paolo to San Sebastian — often just for the weekend.
Theirs is a life led breathlessly, moving from airport to dinner party.
The art is an extravagance that occasionally gives Heather pause.
“401(k)? Art?” she asks, as if weighing the two options. “Tony’s view of investment diversification is multiple artists.”
No wonder Heather worries. Though her childhood was cultured, she was
hardly schooled in the high-fashion — and big-money — realm of
contemporary art. If Tony’s art infatuation developed gradually,
Heather’s blossomed overnight.
“Did I go from zero to 1,000?” she says, referring to her art involvement since meeting Tony. “No. I went from 5 to 1,000.”
Heather now talks about conspiring with “Julie” (as in Roberts, a
major painter in museum collections worldwide) on a portrait of Tony she
commissioned for his birthday. She mentions seeing “Olafur” (as in
Eliasson, a Danish-born photographer whom the Podestas hold in depth) at
an opening.
Still, Heather recalls the day, just weeks into her relationship with
Tony, when she traveled to Chelsea with him to look at art. A gallerist
presented a photograph by a well-known German artist, chirping about
the work’s reasonable price. The piece cost $45,000.
“There are times when I’m the daughter of an academic, in sneakers,”
Heather says of her sticker shock. “I’m just that geek completely out of
place. I felt it then.”
Tony and Heather don’t shy away from discomfort — especially when they can inflict it, ever so gently, on others.
The pictures ringing Tony’s ninth-floor office at PodestaMattoon
deliver an unusual welcome. A suite of arresting computer-manipulated
photographs by Dutch artist Margi Geerlinks serves as a cautionary tale
of genetic engineering. One shows a boy seemingly born from a sewing
machine. Another finds a young girl knitting her own hair. A third has a
naked woman immersed in blood-red liquid.
It’s not hard to imagine the jolt that executives from biotech
concerns such as Genentech or Serono get when they walk into the room —
and they’re clients.
“Some people think it’s a little weird,” Tony says of his choices. “But that’s their problem.”
Steeped in liberal politics, Tony favors art with in-your-face nudity and social critique.
“We’re not trying to confront sexism and racism in our art
collection,” he insists. “Though occasionally they intersect. Some
people’s politics are other people’s aesthetics.”
And some people’s aesthetics are other people’s embarrassments.
Tony’s younger brother John (yes, that John, Bill Clinton’s former chief
of staff and current president of the liberal think tank Center for
American Progress) admires his choices in art but recognizes that not
everyone gets it. Says John, “I don’t think Tony focus-groups his art.”
Though pictures rotate on and off the walls of the couple’s homes, a
piece in the Woodley Park living room stays. Called “Soliloquy VII,” the
nearly eight-foot-tall color photo by British artist Sam Taylor-Wood is
an update of a late-15th-century painting of the dead Jesus.
Taylor-Wood faithfully replicates the original’s composition, here
photographing, in vivid color and minute detail, a young man laid out on
his back. Just one thing: Taylor-Wood omits the shroud, displaying his
subject in all his nakedness.
Though often politely ignored, “Soliloquy VII” is rarely forgotten.
Tony and Heather love it. They crane their necks to hear the whispers
generated when the pols stop in. Tony often uses the work to launch into
a story about Hillary Clinton’s visit, when she ducked and tiptoed
around the work lest any photo opportunity capture her alongside the
naked figure.
“You’ve got to be pretty secure to have an eight-foot-tall naked man
in your living room in Washington, D.C.,” Heather says of her husband’s
choice.
What Heather suggests as a badge of her mate’s confidence is a highly
intentional statement. After all, Tony’s job is to make an impression.
Besides, when the piece isn’t generating blushes, it’s generating
conversation.
“At political events, there’s an inevitable awkwardness,” former
Clinton administration official Sally Katzen said at a Women’s Campaign
Fund dinner at the Podestas’ home this summer. “The art is an
ice-breaker. It puts people at ease.”
Not always. Folks attending a house tour in the Lake Barcroft
neighborhood in Falls Church earlier this year got an eyeful when they
walked into a bedroom at the Podesta residence hung with multiple color
pictures by Katy Grannan, a photographer known for documentary-style
pictures of naked teenagers in their parents’ suburban homes.
“They were horrified,” Heather recalls, a grin spreading across her face.
If Tony and Heather enjoy in-your-face art, they also reward their
artists. The Podestas are eager to assist those they’ve earmarked as
promising, and donate time and resources to the cause.
During last year’s Venice Biennale, they threw parties night after
night, renting out their favorite restaurant and packing it with artists
and a gallerist or two. Here in Washington, they’ve hosted art parties
with Patricia Puccini, Cathy de Monchaux, Anna Gaskell, Frank Thiel,
Annee Olofsson, Nikki Lee and others. Curators from the Hirshhorn Museum
and Corcoran Gallery of Art, top Washington collectors and the city’s
best dealers regularly show up. Podesta parties are where connections
are made.
“I see lobbying as getting information in the hands of people who are
making decisions so they can make more informed decisions,” Tony says.
“We do that a lot with museums.”
The couple also donates. About 300 pieces that have passed through
Tony’s hands are now in museum collections. Locally, the Corcoran
Gallery of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts have
benefited most.
“Tony loves the artists themselves as much as the artworks,” John
Podesta says. Earlier this month, the couple held a party and opening at
their Falls Church home in honor of 34-year-old District artist Avish
Khebrehzadeh.
Tony and Heather liked her work when they saw it at last year’s
Venice Biennale, where the artist received one the event’s prestigious
awards, so her Washington dealer set up a visit. That day with Tony in
the studio, Khebrehzadeh mentioned wanting to work on a large scale but
not having adequate studio space. So Tony offered her the keys to his
Falls Church home, with its ample basement. Last winter, Khebrehzadeh
spent weekdays at the house working.
Now it’s time to show those works and her dealer’s walls aren’t big
enough, either. So Khebrehzadeh’s exhibition opened earlier this month
at the Podestas’ house, in the very space where the art was made.
Visitors may make appointments to see the show.
Other artists have similar stories. For Belgrade-based up-and-comer
Vesna Pavlovic, Heather helped secure a show at Sacramento’s Crocker Art
Museum (Heather once worked for the congressman who represents the
area). For art stars Jane and Louise Wilson, the couple pulled some
Washington strings to ensure the duo had access to Las Vegas casinos for
a video shoot.
“It’s inspiring to meet a collector so involved in his own career
and, parallel to that, in the arts as well,” says video artist and
painter Sarah Morris, speaking from Berlin, where she opened a show last
week. “He’s very committed.”
Morris approached Tony in 2000 with her idea for the film “Capital.”
The piece ended up as an 18-minute look into Washington’s corridors of
power, much of it thanks to strategy sessions with Tony at which Morris
would identify the places she wanted to shoot and Tony would tell her
how likely she’d be to get in.
“Tony speaks in percentiles,” Morris explains. “I’d say ‘Cabinet
Room,’ and he’d be, like, ’30 percent.’ I’d say ‘Pentagon,’ and he’d say
’60 percent.’ ”
Co-conspiratorial leanings aside, Tony likes to see his artists’
results and will travel to openings to support them. “Sometimes our life
feels like an art travelogue,” Tony says of the constant
back-and-forth.
“He travels more than any artist I know. And artists travel a lot,” Morris says. “Tony would show up and surprise you.”
But these days, Tony’s focus is the battleground state of Pennsylvania and getting his candidate elected.
South Korea’s Gwangju Biennial, which opened earlier this month, is
the kind of show that normally would prompt Tony to get on a plane. “If
it weren’t for Kerry, I’d be going,” Tony says with a hint of regret.
It’s one of the few times that art has had to slide.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43480-2004Sep22_3.html
John Podesta, one of President Obama’s closest White House advisers, counts among his key financial supporters Hansjorg Wyss, a reclusive Swiss billionaire whose company conducted illegal human experiments that resulted in the deaths of three elderly patients. (AP/Eric Jamison)
John Podesta, one of President Obama‘s closest White House advisers, counts among his key financial supporters Hansjorg Wyss, a reclusive Swiss billionaire whose company conducted illegal human experiments that resulted in the deaths of three elderly patients.
Justice Department attorneys negotiated a $23.8 million plea deal in 2011 with Synthes Inc., and Norian Corporation, its wholly owned subsidiary, and sent four of its U.S. executives to prison. The money was paid to the federal government.
Two of the victims died in a California hospital and the third perished in a Texas medical facility. One of the California victims was Ryoichi Kikuchi, 83, who died on the operating table at John Muir Hospital in Walnut Creek on Sept. 19, 2009.
He was a prize-winning physicist who analyzed the thermodynamic behavior of liquids and gases and worked at scientific centers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the National Bureau of Standards.
The federal judge who heard the case said the company’s “pattern of deception is unparalleled.”
Synthes was a Swiss medical device firm with U.S. corporate offices in West Chester, Pa. Wyss opened the U.S. office in 1974 and was CEO until the company was bought by Johnson & Johnson in 2012 for $21.3 billion.
The Washington Examiner asked a White House spokesman whether the president was aware of Podesta’s relationship with Wyss or of the three deaths when Podesta was invited to join the chief executive’s inner circle. The spokesman declined to respond.
Podesta, who was White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, and Wyss have been financially linked for years. Among the Swiss billionaire’s largest gifts in recent years have been those made to the Center for American Progress.
CAP received $4.1 million from Wyss during Podesta’s tenure as the liberal nonprofit’s founding president and chief executive officer. A CAP spokesman declined to respond to the Examiner‘s request for information about the Podesta-Wyss relationship.
The HJW Foundation, which is Wyss’s private foundation, hired Podesta in 2013 as a paid consultant, for which he was paid $87,000 that year, according to the presidential counselor’s financial disclosure statement.
A HJW spokesman declined to respond to the Examiner’s questions about the kind of work Podesta performed for the fee.
Wyss has a seat on CAP’s 10-member board of directors, which also includes former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.; and Carol Browner, Obama’s first energy czar and administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Clinton.
Podesta’s think tank is the fourth-largest recipient of Wyss money among 27 liberal nonprofit activist groups the Swiss billionaire has supported since 2008, according to the HJW Foundation’s Internal Revenue Service tax returns.
The IRS 990 tax returns for all of the groups can be reviewed via the Examiner’s Citizen Audit database.
CAP itself was the largest single recipient of HJW contributions in 2011 and 2012, according to the foundation’s IRS filling.
Wyss and other Synthes executives decided to enter the highly profitable field of spinal surgery in 2000 with Norian XR, a cement-like mixture of calcium phosphate with barium sulfate.
Company managers claimed the compound could act like bone when injected in the spine in a procedure called “vertebrosplasty.”
Federal prosecutors noted that at the time there was “excitement about using Norian for vertebroplasties” at Synthes, even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had not approved its use on the spine. FDA approval could take at least three years.
Company managers, however, decided not to seek FDA approval for Norian XR on the spine. Instead, they conducted unauthorized human experiments over a four-year period that included the three deaths.
FDA officials got wind of the deadly experiments and dispatched Capt. Joseph Despins in May 2004 to conduct an unannounced inspection, which kept him at the company until June 18.
Despins’ findings subsequently became the basis for a federal indictment of the company, its subsidiary and four of its officers, which was filed June 16, 2009.
U.S. District Judge Legrome D. Davis said during a 2011 sentencing hearing following the plea agreement that the two firms ran “rogue clinical trials,” conducted “illegal training of spine surgeons” and “in search of profits, chose not to tell the FDA the truth.”
He also said they “did not stop the testing until three elderly patients had died on the operating table over the period of a year. … This pattern of deception is unparalleled.”
Four Synthes executives went to jail, each for varying terms of less than one year, in the plea agreement. They admitted their company had feloniously conspired “to defraud the United States” in an effort “to impair and impede the lawful functions of the Food and Drug Administration.”
Wyss was not named in the indictment but was referred to as “Person No. 7” and the “CEO and a major stockholder of Synthes.” Wyss was CEO and major stockholder at the time of the indictment and the experiments.
Wyss, who now lives in Wyoming, is a major donor to scores of liberal groups in this country, with his contributions estimated to total more than $110 million, according to the HJW Foundation’s tax filings with the IRS since 2008.
The Swiss Broadcasting Corp. reported last year that Wyss was the second-richest person in Switzerland. He is the 112th wealthiest man in the world, with a net worth estimated at $11.2 billion by Forbes magazine.
Despite his relationship with Podesta and active role in funding liberal political activism, Wyss is not well known to the American public.
In fact, George Soros, the high-profile financial supporter of many liberal groups, has given less to CAP than Wyss.
Wyss told a Swiss newspaper in a rare interview in 2011 that “nobody knows me, and I hope that it stays like this,” according to Fortune.
But federal court documents paint a graphic description of his firm’s brazen decision to ignore the FDA’s drug approval procedures, which are intended to assure patient safety.
The FDA had previously approved another Synthes-produced substance for use in treating injured bones in the arm.
But in order for XR to be used in spinal cases, the company had to complete the government’s Investigational Device Exemption process.
Regardless of whether the company pursued the IDE process, however, the FDA required Synthes to include a warning label on the XR compound’s container stating it was “not intended for the treatment of vertebral compression fractures.”
Wyss and his subordinates decided during a Nov. 15, 2001, meeting to forgo the IDE process and to proceed with the unauthorized human experiments, according to the indictment.
“Person No. 7 decided that Synthes would not pursue an IDE study,” the indictment said, referring directly to Wyss. The meeting minutes noted the CEO and his subordinates ordered 60-80 test procedures without FDA approval.
In a pre-sentencing report, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Crawley described Wyss’s role: “After this [November] meeting Wyss, the CEO and major shareholder of Synthes, directed that Synthes would not pursue FDA approval of Norian XR via an IDE,” but “would press on with a ‘test market’” with surgeons.
Crawley also said the Synthes test market programs “were not slow or cautious, or careful, or motivated by patient safety.”
Davis said at a Dec. 13, 2011, sentencing hearing for Michael D. Huggins, one of the convicted Synthes executives, that “the safer and lawful approval route was expressly rejected.”
“One of the most offensive things was the little piddly sentence they got for this,” complained Eva Sloan, whose elderly mother, Lois Eskind, died during an XR experiment, according to Fortune.
Sloan filed a separate wrongful death lawsuit against the company in 2012 that charged “willful, wanton, malicious and reckless misconduct.”
The four executives “could have gone to 7-Eleven and stolen a six-pack of beer and got more time,” she said.
Sloan’s lawsuit was settled out of court. Laura Feld, Sloan’s attorney, said she could not comment because the settlement included a confidentiality agreement.
Defense attorney Brent J. Gurney told Davis at a sentencing hearing he thought Wyss was the missing person at the table.
“There is another person who is not present in this process,” he said while representing former Synthes executive Richard E. Bohner, “and that is the former chairman, CEO, controlling shareholder of the company, Mr. Wyss.”
Gurney, a former U.S. attorney, said, “Mr. Wyss was a highly involved owner of Synthes. The record shows that at the very beginning, it was he who made some of the very critical decisions that put the company on its ultimate pathway.”
Washington Examiner intern Monica Perez of the National Journalism Center contributed to this report.