Dani Levinas, collector and confidant of the great art fortunes, dies | Culture

Dani Levinas, an art collector and curator who told the story of the great patrons in this newspaper, died this Tuesday in Miami at the age of 75. The businessman, born in Buenos Aires in 1948, has had access in recent years to those large private collections that the rest of us must content ourselves with seeing from afar or in certain publications. These conversations, published in EL PAÍS, were gathered in the book The guardians of art (The Factory), in which Levinas spoke with 34 personalities.

“My collection, compared to those of my interviewees, is very small,” he said in an interview with this newspaper in March 2023 when he moved to live in Madrid after decades of residing in Washington. That collection, formed with his wife, Mirella Levinas (who died in 2022), has some 800 pieces of contemporary art with a large number of artists from Latin America and was partly displayed in his house in the Georgetown neighborhood, which closed a couple of years ago. years, after the death of his wife, to whom he had been close since their adolescence in Argentina. He then moved a portion of those treasures to his Madrid home in the Las Letras neighborhood.

Levinas was also president of the board of trustees of The Phillips Collection, the first modern art museum in the United States, based in Washington, and was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Reina Sofía Museum Foundation in Madrid. His death reached him in Miami, where he had an apartment. It was, according to family sources, during preparation for a medical check-up when he felt bad and died.

He came from a family linked to art. Together with one of his brothers, Gabriel Levinas, a famous Argentine journalist, he opened the Arte Múltiple gallery in Buenos Aires, thanks to which he began collecting. As a young man, he worked in the family ski equipment business. His business success came after moving to Washington in the early 1980s. It was thanks to a publication in installments (already a first newsletter) that offered executives tools for public speaking. Levinas used to say with one of his contagious smiles that the idea came to him when he read a survey of the main CEOs of the United States that established a ranking of their greatest fears: speaking in front of an audience of strangers was in second place, after fear to the death.

His passion for art led him to collecting. At fairs around the world he was an always jovial presence, appreciated by the galleries, both the established ones and the young ones, with whom he always liked to keep up to date. He was now about to open his own exhibition space in Madrid, in the design of which he was being helped by his other brother, Salo Levinas, an architect living in Washington. He explained on Tuesday morning that Dani was in perfect health and in a good state of life when the unexpected happened.

In addition to his two brothers, he is survived by his three children: Mariana, Diego and Pablo.

The idea of ​​starting the series of interviews for EL PAÍS arose in 2018. The first talk (Levinas was terrified that these conversations could be taken for interviews) was with Alain Dominique Perrin, from the Cartier Foundation, in Paris. He sent them to the newspaper with an uncertain but faithful frequency. The last one was with Ricardo and Susana Steinbruch, Brazilian collectors.

Not only did he get the key to the homes of the biggest fortunes in the art world; In addition, once inside, he managed to get characters apparently as reticent to make a statement as J. Tomilson Hill, one of the world’s great art collectors (his paintings are in the Uffizi Gallery), with his own museums, to finish him off. half confessing with a mischievous smile that perhaps he owns Judith and Holofernesone of the last paintings that have appeared by Caravaggio (it is estimated that it has a sale price of more than 100 million), whose attribution remains surrounded by controversy.

“I don’t have any tricks,” he confessed to EL PAÍS. “I’m not going as a journalist, I’m not going as an art critic. We are colleagues. Let’s say it’s a conversation from collector to collector. They let their guard down,” he told this newspaper.

Levinas also spoke with the multi-millionaire couple Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales, who own the Glenstone Museum in Maryland, where they have assembled an art collection with more than 1,300 modern and contemporary pieces. Or with Helga de Alvear, a German collector living in Spain, who has also chosen to gather her assets in a center in Cáceres and who in each edition of Arco gives the good news with million-dollar purchases.

At the Madrid fair, Levinas was a regular visitor, and had the habit of offering a drink at his house when it closed on Sunday. Consequently, the city’s art world shared its shock and grief over his sudden death on social media and in private messages in the hours after the news broke.

Levinas always had one requirement in his interviews: “I tried to look for collectors who share art with the public. What matters most to artists is that their work is seen by as many eyes as possible and for that the work cannot be locked up,” he said.

Death cut short his plans to write a book about open-air museums, perhaps the maximum expression of the liberation of art he sought. It also prevented him from fulfilling his goal of sharing his own collection with the public in Madrid.

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