Collector of Fashion and Art: Margot Siegel

Margot Siegel lives in a high-rise behind the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Her apartment has the antiseptic white walls and beige carpeting of any rental unit, but it also boasts a world-class art collection. Her living room alone features pieces by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns.

But Siegel, 86, also collects in a less formal genre: hybrids of art and fashion, an area only beginning to find respect in the fine-art world. This niche seems only natural, since Siegel is descended from a legendary local fashionista—her mother, Jeanne Auerbacher, was one of the early buyers for Dayton’s Oval Room.

Siegel’s own career spanned continents and industries but never strayed far outside the bounds of art and fashion. Just after World War II, she served as an editor and international correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily. After returning to Minneapolis in the 1950s, she served as public relations director for the Walker and later as an arts and fashion columnist for Skyway News. Meanwhile, she amassed an impressive cache of mash-ups: Warhol renderings on handbags and tennis shoes, perfume packaged and designed by French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, photos of herself with famous designers such as Pauline Trigère. Over the years, she has donated many of these treasures to the Goldstein Museum of Design in St. Paul. Now the museum offers a peek at her personal collection with its exhibition Intersections: Where Art and Fashion Meet.

Just before the show opened in July, the gallery sent the curators, Barbara Heinemann and Mark Schultz, on reconnaissance to Siegel’s apartment. For the occasion, Siegel donned diamonds, pearls, and red lipstick. Without haste, the casually dressed curators situated themselves on the living room floor and started opening packages Siegel had just shipped from her second home near Miami. Among the contents: a Stephen Sprouse for Louis Vuitton handbag and an early Warhol illustration of a high-heel shoe. Then the curators went rifling through drawers and closets. Schultz unearthed a Versace silk scarf from a console drawer; the motif bore references to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Michelangelo. Later Schultz pulled a Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton “Cherries” coin purse from one of Siegel’s handbags. “Maybe you should take the quarters out,” quipped Siegel.

The curators also had designs on Siegel’s hall tree, a fixture weighted down with Warhol- and Klimt-inspired bags. Schultz plucked the “That’s Love” cream canvas tote Marc Jacobs designed for Louis Vuitton in 2007, which references Robert Indiana’s much-appropriated “Love” illustration from the 1970s. “You’re taking that, too?” said Siegel with a frown. “But I love that bag!”

During a lifetime of collecting, Siegel accumulated countless other treasures: a “joke bag” that Richard Prince designed for Louis Vuitton; the infamous 1966–67 Campbell’s “Souper” paper dress, which was framed and displayed in her hallway until the museum borrowed it for the show. Interestingly, the exhibition also features fashions Siegel never owned, only coveted: a Picasso-inspired dress by Yves Saint Laurent and a Moschino dress covered in art by Roy Lichtenstein, which Siegel once admired when it was worn by a coworker at the Walker.

Intersections: Where Art and Fashion Meet runs through Nov. 1 at the U of M's Goldstein Museum of Design, 241 McNeal Hall, 1985 Buford Ave., St. Paul, 612-624-7434