Celebrity Art Collectors: From Madonna to Oprah Winfrey

A feature on TheCollector highlights seven celebrities with significant art collections, revealing their tastes and the stories behind their acquisitions. Madonna, who began collecting in 1987 with a $1 million Fernand Léger painting, owns works by Tamara de Lempicka and two Frida Kahlo self-portraits. Leonardo DiCaprio's collection includes pieces by Frank Stella, Takashi Murakami, Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Banksy, and Salvador Dalí, along with a dinosaur skeleton, and he focuses on environmental art. Elton John, who has collected art obsessively, owns the largest private collection of 20th-century photography, including a 149-piece Nan Goldin installation purchased in 1999. David Bowie, who collected Basquiat's 'Air Power' in 1995, also owned works by Tintoretto, Rubens, Egon Schiele, Meret Oppenheim, and Ernst Haeckel. Beyoncé and Jay-Z have a collection featuring Basquiat, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, and Ed Ruscha, and they filmed a music video in the Louvre. Jack Nicholson's collection, estimated at $150 million, includes works by Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Rodin, and Tamara de Lempicka. Oprah Winfrey focuses on African and African American artists, including Kerry James Marshall, and formerly owned Gustav Klimt's 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II', which she sold in 2016 for $150 million.