Meet the Collector: John Jonas On Living With Art

When one grows up in a family of prominent art collectors, it’s not uncommon to outright reject collecting as a pastime or to chart a very different course from one’s parents. New York art collector John Jonas, who opened his apartment overlooking the Williamsburg Bridge to Observer on a cold Saturday in early January, did both, first eschewing collecting altogether and then approaching his own collection from a place of preference and passion. That collection, which spans more than 100 works by European postwar masters, Dansaekhwa pioneers and contemporary artists, hangs in said apartment, which was designed specifically to house it.

Jonas was raised amid masterpieces by Abstract Expressionist figures such as Mark Rothko, Morris Louis and Willem de Kooning, as well as works by contemporary artists like Isamu Noguchi and Joseph Cornell. His parents began collecting early, guided by one of the sharpest advisors available at the time: Diane Waldman, then a leading curator at the Guggenheim, where Barbara Jonas served on the board. In a youthful act of rebellion, Jonas distanced himself from family expectations, embracing a bohemian life in the Village. He pursued his love of jazz, playing the saxophone and immersing himself in creative circles. “I had several friends who were artists; I spent time with them, saw their work and would play music while they were creating art.”

At one point, Jonas lived in Maine, where he grew close to local painter Carlo Pittore. The relationship proved formative, sharpening his eye and deepening his love of art—even as he remained distanced from his family’s collecting activities. At the time, Jonas occasionally acquired works from friends, often as gifts or gestures of support. It wasn’t until much later that he began collecting with intention—a practice he’s maintained steadily for the past 15 years.

“I was walking through The Armory Show with a friend when I saw a painting and thought, ‘wow.’ I spoke with the woman who was running the gallery, we made a deal, and that was it,” Jonas recalls, describing his first acquisition: a cinematic close-up of a woman’s face by German artist Florian Süssmayr, now hanging near a library filled with art books and artists’ catalogs. Largely self-taught, Jonas has always followed his instinct, buying only what resonated with him—what he truly loved. “I didn’t grow up going to galleries or fairs with my parents. We were on completely different tracks. They thought I was crazy when I decided to play saxophone instead of pursuing a business career.”

After that transformative purchase, he began navigating the art world on his own, in part to preserve the creative energy of those early Village years. “I started going on my own to fairs, galleries and eventually auctions,” he says. “Fairs were a huge education for me. You go, you see everything, you start to understand what you like and what you don’t. You see certain artists repeatedly and suddenly think, ‘Wait a minute, I think I like this artist.’”

Although his choices have remained deeply personal, Jonas has also worked with advisors from time to time. The gallerist who sold him his first painting later guided him toward other pieces, including a bright, poetic watercolor of a young girl by Kim McCarthy and a work by Callum Innes from her own collection, which Jonas immediately loved. Others he discovered entirely on his own, such as an abstract piece by Hagen Mark he spotted at a fair. “Over time, it became more serious—and honestly, more addictive,” he says of his relationship with art.

Eventually, Jonas became comfortable buying at auction, moving fluidly between the primary and secondary markets. Advisors offered input, but he continued to gravitate toward fairs and galleries, shaping his collection according to his own taste. “I always feel gratified when someone looks at the collection and says, ‘This feels like a truly personal collection. It’s really you. It’s an extension of who you are.’ When I hear that, it means a lot to me.”

Auctions became especially compelling when he developed an early interest in Dansaekhwa—well before prices for its key figures began to soar. About ten or eleven years ago, Jonas traveled to Korea with Belgian advisor and dealer Vincent Matthieu, whom he’d met at a dinner hosted by Tina Kim and who has since become a close friend and a key companion in his collecting journey. “We attended all the auctions—we were essentially the only Westerners there at the time,” he recalls. “We visited Park Seo-Bo’s studio, Hyundai Gallery, Kukje Gallery, Hakgojae and others. I ended up buying works by many of the masters. Some I bought at auction—sometimes waking up at three in the morning because that’s when the Korean auctions were happening.” That’s how Jonas acquired two historical works by Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo at prices dramatically different from today’s market for the postwar pioneers.

Around the same time, in 2005, his parents, Donald and Barbara Jonas—who had made their fortune in the housewares retail business—decided to part with their collection, consigning it to Christie’s. The two-day postwar and contemporary sale was a major success, bringing in $170,955,400, then a record for the category. Fifteen works from the Jonas collection accounted for a significant portion of the sale, with three among the top lots of the evening: a 1949 Willem de Kooning abstraction, a 1964 Mark Rothko color field painting and a powerful Franz Kline from 1958. It set new records for several artists, including Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Joseph Cornell and Isamu Noguchi—a testament to the strength of the works they had acquired. Approximately $44 million was raised from the Jonas works alone, which the family planned to donate in full to establish a charitable legacy.

Jonas’s parents felt they “had been extremely fortunate and it was time to give back.” “We’re truly just custodians of these works,” Barbara Jonas told ArtNews at the time. “The art in their collection became the foundation of our philanthropic work. Everything we’ve been able to do over the past eighteen years comes from the paintings that were once on their walls,” Jonas says, recalling how, when his father first suggested selling the art, his mother replied, “Over my dead body.” Ultimately, they sold about two-thirds of it, and then eventually, all of it. “Because of that art, we’ve been able to do an enormous amount over the last 18 years, and we’ll continue to do so.” All proceeds from the Christie’s sale went to the Jewish Communal Fund. Subsequent sales from the remaining third of the collection—administered by Jonas after his parents’ passing—helped fund Jonas Philanthropies, which the couple formally created a year later, in 2006, while they were still alive.

Today, John Jonas serves as co-president of Jonas Philanthropies, the family foundation focused on supporting nursing leadership, vision health and environmental health. Over time, the organization has expanded to include initiatives in mental health, professional nursing education, veterans’ services, children’s environmental well-being and vision care—particularly through the Jonas Children’s Vision Care program established in 2016.

Seeing the success of the Christie’s sale—and what his parents were able to accomplish with the proceeds—further solidified Jonas’s view that art can operate as value on multiple levels. “My parents bought out of passion, but they also worked with an incredible advisor. They were lucky and smart, and the works they purchased skyrocketed in value. That left a real impression on me—that art isn’t just beautiful, it can also be a very interesting asset allocation. It can appreciate enormously,” he reflects, acknowledging that early on he, too, considered collecting not only as a passion but as a potential investment.

“When you start collecting, that idea naturally enters your mind—maybe this could become something more,” Jonas says. He recalls how many collectors like him, especially during the boom years, couldn’t help but ask: Will this be worth more? Is this a good buy? Advisors often reinforced that logic, saying, “This is going up,” or “This artist is hot.”

“You can easily slip into buying something because you think it will appreciate rather than because you truly love it. I definitely drank that Kool-Aid for a while,” he admits. At times, that meant acquiring two works—one to keep, the other with resale in mind. But that strategy never fully satisfied him. “If it doesn’t work out, you’re left with something you don’t love, and then you ask yourself, Why did I buy this? So I don’t really do that anymore. Even if someone tells me something is going up, if I don’t love it, I don’t care.”

Still, looking around his light-filled apartment today, it’s clear some works have appreciated—particularly on the historical side. That includes pieces by Dansaekhwa pioneers such as Park Seo-Bo, Ha Chong-Hyun, Lee Dong-Youb and Lee Ufan, as well as works by more established contemporary artists, including Lisa Yuskavage, Flora Yukhnovich, Donna Huanca and Marguerite Humeau.

There was one painting Jonas loved so deeply he never imagined parting with it—until it reached six times its purchase price. “At the time I thought, well, six times fifty is three hundred, and I can buy a lot of art for three hundred,” he says. “So I gave up that one in order to afford many more.” Selling, in that sense, became a way to let the collection evolve. Over 16 years, tastes shift, priorities change and the collector changes, too.

Today, historical masters hang alongside rising artists such as Iva Lulashi, Hilda Palafox, Amy Bravo, Emma Beatrez and Sanié Bonkhari, as well as Nate Lewis, Manuel Solano, Simon Benjamin, Andrew Sendor and Rodrigo Ramírez—all seamlessly integrated into the interior’s serene palette and elegantly minimal forms.

Jonas’s new apartment, formed by combining two units on the 26th floor of a building along the Williamsburg waterfront, was designed by Labscape with the specific goal of welcoming his extensive collection. The layout allows for swift rotation of works and integrates the art into the living space so it can be appreciated at any moment of the day. To that end, they conceived a flexible “gallery space” with movable walls that create changing configurations and encourage conversation, while a carefully calibrated lighting system enhances each piece. “Since I have a large collection of art, we built movable walls and panels to display it. With so many windows, we needed ways to create additional wall space,” he says. “Even now, there’s still a lot of art I can’t hang—some of it ends up in bathrooms, some of it stays in storage. I still have plenty more than I can show at once.”

Jonas handled most of the curation himself, and rehanging the collection became a way to surface connecting threads and recurring themes. “You start to see the connections between different choices. That process is actually one of the most enjoyable parts for me,” he says, recalling how, when he worked in his father’s housewares store, arranging art prints on the wall was always his favorite task. “You could play with relationships and composition. That’s exactly what I enjoy doing at home.”

When asked to identify the biggest evolution in his collecting, Jonas points to clarity. “Usually, now I know right away if I like something. I do like to get secondary opinions from people I trust, but there are certain themes that run consistently through my collecting: one is women. One is innocence. And one is a kind of minimalism. You could probably place most of the works in the collection into one of those three categories.”

If Jonas grew up surrounded by the expressive force of Abstract Expressionism, the early phase of his own collecting leaned toward restraint, neutral palettes and a sense of order. “I was initially drawn to postwar abstraction that focused on signs, markings and restrained gestures,” he says, recalling how, after the Dansaekhwa pioneers, he gravitated toward European figures such as Hans Hartung and Italians like Agostino Bonalumi and Piero Dorazio. “Minimalist aesthetics were close to me. I bought works that related to grids and reduced compositions—blue backgrounds, structured surfaces, works very close to the Frank Stella drawing I have.”

Eventually, the palette became almost too restrained. With so many white works, his living room turned entirely white. “If I bought another one, I would have had to jump out the window,” he jokes. “The calm, serenity and quiet of those works really mattered to me. But eventually I wanted to move somewhere else, and that’s when color entered the picture.”

After years of collecting historical names, Jonas grew increasingly interested in discovering and supporting living artists—often at early stages in their careers. “I rediscovered the excitement of participating, of supporting young careers, of being early. There’s something thrilling about finding someone you believe in and committing to that,” he says.

Attending fairs with a younger advisor gave him the chance to meet artists directly, learn about their work firsthand and appreciate the human presence behind it. That closeness eventually led him to become a patron, supporting artists and backing a New York contemporary gallery focused on emerging voices in its expansion. “This gave me closer access to artists themselves and their work, in a way that galleries often don’t. It allowed for a more direct relationship, rather than being kept at a distance,” he reflects.

Entering the ultracontemporary space during the boom years—with waiting lists and BOGO deals—Jonas occasionally found himself donating works to museums in order to gain access to artists he genuinely wanted to collect. One such case involved Nate Lewis, for whom he donated a work to the Carnegie Museum. Still, that maneuver, he says, ultimately helped forge a more direct and trusting relationship with the artist that later granted access to stronger works and, in some cases, commissions.

Looking ahead, Jonas says he wants to remain close to artists, which is why he designed his apartment to welcome both the art and the people behind it. “For example, to get a beautiful sculpture by Eli Ping, I contacted him directly on Instagram. I asked for images, shared photos of where the work would live, and invited him over. He came for lunch. I got to know him. That’s incredibly meaningful. If that’s patronage, I don’t know, but getting closer to artists like this is deeply rewarding, because they’re people—and through that relationship, you understand the work differently.”

Like any collector, Jonas has regrets and dream acquisitions. His dream piece has always been an Egon Schiele. One of his biggest regrets? Not buying an Avery Singer the first time he encountered her work. “That one always comes to mind,” he says, recalling an early piece shown at an art fair in Paris, when she was still presenting with a small German gallery. Years passed before he acted, and by then, it was out of reach. “At some point, you say, all right, next case. It’s overpriced now, it’s no longer at a level that makes sense for me, and the moment has passed.”

A similar story unfolded with Japanese artist Yu Nishimura, whom Jonas discovered early on but struggled to access. Though prices have shifted—especially following a stellar year of auction records and David Zwirner representation—Jonas recently acquired a piece from Nishimura’s latest show at Crèvecœur in Paris. “It’s a little baby one, and I’d still like to get another. But once the train has left the station that far, it becomes very difficult.”

Even with a collection so large, Jonas admits he’s never managed to set a strict annual budget. “I’ll tell myself, I shouldn’t buy anymore, I really shouldn’t—and then I do. If I have the money, I can afford it and I love it, then boom. It’s my biggest passion. It’s a passion, it’s an addiction—but it’s a rewarding addiction.”

Taken broadly, Jonas sees his collecting as a natural extension of his engagement with beauty. “I love art, I love music, I love dance,” he says. “To be able to live with it, embrace it, learn about it and discover the next piece of beauty in the world—it’s incredible. They’re like my children, you know. And I love all my children.”

More art collector interviews

• Art Collector Raphaël Isvy Wants to Rewrite the Rules of Buying and Selling

• How Kim Manocherian Is Building Narratives Through Art

• For John Wieland, Collecting Art Is About Feeling at Home

• Collector Yu Kimoto Explains How Japan’s Next Gen Collectors Are Rethinking the Art World

• Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu Share the Passion and Vision Behind Magazzino Italian Art

• Kayode Adegbola On Building a Gallery That Reflects His Passions