Art attack

When it comes to describing their art, decoration is a dirty word in Dennis Adrian and Richard Born’s household. “For people who collect, if the collection is a matter of decoration, there’s probably not much to it,” Adrian says, “because their focus isn’t on the work, it’s on the decorating.”

The two men—Adrian a retired art critic, curator and School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor, and Born, a senior curator at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum—lean back on the cream sofa in the sun-drenched living room of their Lakeview apartment. Opera pipes through the nearby Bose speakers—Adrian didn’t want to miss the high notes—and perpetually refilled Champagne flutes sit on the ’60s glass coffee table.

Between their combined nearly 90 years of collecting with relatively limited funds, the couple estimate they own around 250 pieces—mostly paintings and a few sculptures—from the ’60s to the ’90s, plus a few Peruvian antiquities. That doesn’t even account for the 200 modernist German and Austrian ceramics from the ’20s and ’30s, which Born jokingly refers to as his “little problem,” stowed away in a few cabinets; nor does it include the 30 shopping bags and 60 boxes full of art books.

Their home, a 1,500-square-foot space in a two-story graystone, is modest in size, but the two men creatively use every inch without making it feel cluttered. Paintings hang from both sides of the doors, Roger Brown sculptures and folk artist Aldobrando Piacenza’s church-shaped birdhouses rest on the tops of bookcases, and traditional individual Korean tables occupy floor space.

“You meet those [collectors who] say, ‘I don’t have any wall space left,’?” Adrian says. “We say, ‘Remove the furniture. Can’t you cover the window?’?” He laughs, but he’s only half-joking.

For the most part, excepting the heavy Arts and Crafts dining table that Born salvaged from the Renaissance Society’s storage room on its way to the Dumpster, they keep the furniture to a minimum.

“We’ve had people come in here and say, “You don’t live here, do you?” Adrian says. But in reality, the home feels quite, well, homey. Guests make themselves comfortable moving around the Arne Jacobsen and Alvar Aalto chairs from the dining and living rooms to converse and view the art. And the art itself, “bouncy,” bright-colored works, warms the entire space.

As curators, Adrian and Born can’t help but be guided by practical concerns. For instance, their only works on paper—a wall of framed illustrated letters from sculptor H.C. Westermann to Adrian—fill the corridor leading to the kitchen because it’s the only area where they can steer clear of natural light. (Due to lack of wall space and the amount of sunlight in their current apartment, Adrian donated 450 works on paper to the Smart Museum when they moved eight years ago.) That said, unlike laying out a museum exhibition, which often has a didactic purpose, the men enjoy the freedom of art directing their private environment. Rather than drawing strict stylistic distinctions, they find similar formal values across works.

As for the specific rooms, the dining area packs a punch with four sizable male nudes in addition to eight portraits. The theme of coupling creeps into the bedroom, which showcases a few local husband-and-wife artists. In the converted back porch, Richard Willenbrink’s lush landscapes of the Oregon coast, where the couple own a second home, hang around the periphery above thousands of categorized art books.

After spending decades immersed in the art world, befriending artists, working closely with gallerists and critically studying the field, the men have an upper hand as collectors, not only in the sense of getting first dibs or a good deal. His partner balks at the suggestion, but Born points out that Adrian has an eye for items that will become icons, such as the Noguchi bedside lamps that he picked up years before Noguchi became a name.

As eclectic as the collection is, motif-like threads, such as the Abstracta tables, create a sense of cohesion from room to room. In subtle ways, it comes full circle. Born notes that the very same Oriental rug in the living room appears in a Sylvia Sleigh painting that hangs in the Smart Museum.

“You know, more is more,” Adrian says. “What’s that old Mae West saying? That too much of a good thing can be absolutely wonderful!”

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