'Better home than mine': How Vancouver's condo king is making great art accessible to all Canadians
Bob Rennie’s father drove a beer truck in Vancouver for a living, which may or may not have been a coincidence, given “Robo,” as he was known, loved to drink.
The Rennie family home on the city’s east side was a chaotic place for a child, with an alcoholic under the roof and parents who fought and made up and fought some more. To escape, Rennie sought refuge at his aunt and uncle’s place. They had money and their art collection was of the kind that wealthy people bought at auctions and discussed at dinner parties.
Young Rennie could not claim to be an art aficionado, but Mieko Izumi, the girl he met when he was 10, married at 19 and ultimately divorced in his mid-30s after he came out, was an artist and immersed in a scene he found irresistible.
For whatever reason, art spoke to Rennie. The message he heard in 1974 while in San Francisco was that he needed to buy a Norman Rockwell print he was looking at even though it cost US$375, plus delivery to Vancouver, which was more than the sum of the teenager’s savings from bussing tables at the Old Spaghetti Factory, but definitely worth it.
“Being poor and from the downtown east side, I saw that print — a boy and girl on top of the world — as some kind of a utopia,” he said.
That print now hangs in a bathroom at Rennie’s home on Granville Island, and to say his first purchase was followed by more would be an understatement. There are 120 or so other artworks displayed around his house and about 3,800 others stored in warehouses across the city and 102 more on loan to museums and galleries around the world.
It is an art trove Rennie has selectively begun to sell off while donating a bunch more , including 61 pieces valued at $22 million that he gave to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
This was not his first gift earmarked for Ottawa. He started donating to the gallery in 2012 and he handed over another batch of art in late November that was valued at about $30 million, bringing his grand total of gifts to roughly $65 million to date. The plan for next year? Keep giving.
“I need the best custodian in the world, so that’s why the National Gallery is the perfect home for this artwork because they can conserve, they can preserve and they can lend the art to other museums and galleries,” he said. “Nobody, me included, thought 20 years ago, ‘Gee, how will this art live later?’ They’re just surprised some nut job collector wanted to buy it back then, right?”
By age 21, the one-time busboy had become a workaholic real estate agent , who grabbed ahold of Vancouver’s condo craze in 1989 and founded several entities that today run the real estate gamut from marketing to buying and selling.
In a city awash with towers, the Vancouver newspapers crowned Rennie the “Condo King,” a label he isn’t all that comfortable wearing, but it has not hurt the bottom line. Real estate made him an extremely wealthy fellow, one who is wary of attending funerals and weddings since people in social settings tend to know him as the condo guy and all they ever want to talk to him about is real estate.
What he most enjoys discussing is contemporary art and the renowned Rennie collection that he spends about 30 per cent of his working day working on. Its now 69-year-old owner is quick to say it would not exist without his chief collaborationist and friend, Carey Fouks. However, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end and he does not want to burden his adult children with his hobby after he’s gone.
Refer to Rennie as a “ philanthropist ” in conversation and there is a good chance he might blush. Philanthropist, he said, is a “big word,” and it does not entirely reflect what he has been up to with his art donations.
Around the time he came to terms with his sexuality in the early 1990s, a lightbulb switched on in his head. People were always telling him he needed to own works by the Group of Seven, Emily Carr and other established Canadian names to be considered a serious collector in this country.
“For a while, I became addicted to Ken Danby, the Canadian realist — you remember At the Crease — but then on a dime in the late ’80s, early ’90s, I decided — and I don’t know, but it might parallel with me coming out — to collect with my heart and my eye and not my ear,” he said.
In other words, Rennie resolved to do it his way. His approach is not to view art as an investment or “trophy” to work into conversation during cocktail parties. Instead, he’s drawn to art that has a “social message.”
Of the 4,000 pieces in his collection, he said 1,200 can be classified as being “financially strong,” 400 as “amazingly strong” and 2,400 are purely for context, meaning if push came to shove and he was forced to sell those ones, he would take 50 cents on the dollar and be done with it.
“Ninety-nine per cent of art only sells once,” he said.
It is the one per cent of art that gets people excited. On that front, here’s a story.
Once upon a time at a furniture auction in California, Rennie came across a painting by Kerry James Marshall called Invisible Man. The title was borrowed from Ralph Ellison’s American novel from the 1950s about white society’s inability to see past its stereotypes of Blacks. Marshall played with the theme in his painting, and Rennie was captivated by the work’s powerful “social message.”
It being the late 1990s, he bought the painting for about US$50,000, and soon after received a call from an incredulous art dealer saying he had overpaid for it by at least “double.”
Perhaps that was true at the time. However, when Rennie sold the painting last year for an undisclosed king’s ransom — Marshall’s works today sell for between $6 million and $20 million — far be it from the condo king to say, “I told you so.”
It is not about the money, he said, but sometimes the money works out in the collector’s favour, and Rennie, through his donations, is actively sharing the bounty.
“These extraordinary gifts that Bob Rennie and his family have given to the nation over the years support our mission to make great art accessible to all Canadians,” Jean-Francois Bélisle, chief executive of the National Gallery of Canada, said.
Rennie’s November gift to the gallery is anchored by a pair of Marshall artworks. Wake is both an installation and a work in progress. At the time of its creation in 2003, it depicted a black sailing ship with 20 medallions strung from the mast. Each medallion was to represent one of the first 20 slaves to arrive in what is now the United States in the 1600s.
Every time the work has been displayed since, Marshall, who is 69 and African-American, adds another medallion to it to represent all the paths — lawyers, doctors, waiters, ballerinas and more — Black life has sailed in since that ship’s arrival.
“It now has 1,300 medallions on it,” Rennie said. “That narrative — that story of the first 20 slaves — can’t leave us; it must be protected, so these works have to go to safe places, and that’s why it is being given to the National Gallery.”
His art-filled home is upstairs from the family’s real estate business, which his son Kris is in charge of, though Rennie is never far from work. Each year, he is allotted a $1.5-million budget to buy art and he admits he struggles to stick within it, although he has slowed down his purchases and on average buys a piece of art every other day, and sometimes for as little as $5.
Whether he can quit collecting cold turkey and stick to the plan of divesting most of his holdings by age 75 remains an open question requiring a “lot of therapy,” he said, but with the Vancouver condo market at a standstill, he has time to work on things.
The city is in a “tools-down” environment, he said. His real estate business has not made money in two years and the company has been forced to lay off staff. While not a policymaker, Rennie does have some thoughts as to how to reboot the market. At the top of the list would be tying home ownership to immigration and targeting immigrants in areas of need.
For example, if Canada requires more doctors, then the government should recruit more doctors, but tie their entry to Canada to the purchase of a new home. You want in? You have to buy in. The hypothetical physician/buyer, who then swallows the foreign home buyer’s tax and for the next five years works and pays taxes in Canada, would under Rennie’s imagined plan begin to recoup the foreign buyer tax starting year six.
“We need to recognize that every Canadian initially came from somewhere else and that immigration is vital to the country’s economic growth, but we need to be smart about it,” he said.
The art collector started in San Francisco with a boy and a girl on top of the world, but the road has lately wound its way to Ottawa to the benefit of a nation, and Rennie is not done yet.
“My kids can’t run the collection, I relate it to, if I played tennis every day — why would I make my kids play tennis?” he said. “The art we are giving away is going to a better home than mine.”
• Email: joconnor@postmedia.com