A Rare Look at Bob Greenberg's Collection of 'Outsider Art'

Bob Greenberg, the digital effects pioneer, legendary adman and founder of creative Goliath R/GA has, as you might expect, an impressive view from his New York office. Through its double set of casement windows, Greenberg can look out on a leafy courtyard and the bustle of West 39th Street in Hell's Kitchen. But as he works, Greenberg actually turns his back to that view. Instead, as he sits at his desk, he faces a wall—a wall hung with an enormous piece of art called "History of the Plant Farm Museum," painted by Howard Finster in 1982. The titanic canvas is among the 1,100 pieces of art in Greenberg's collection, one he's been building since the early 1980s. (A gallery follows below.) Bob Greenberg R/GA Greenberg's art collection is on his mind a lot these days, because it—along with he and R/GA itself—is moving. Having outgrown the distinctive but small Bauhaus headquarters just east of Ninth Avenue that Greenberg built just in 1984, R/GA will relocate in mid December to the new Hudson Yards complex now rising a few blocks to the south. For Greenberg, taking all his art down from the walls (and every inch of R/GA's present quarters seems to hold some piece of it) is a daunting task. "Quite frankly, I never knew until we started to move how much of an effect it has," he said on a recent afternoon, clad in his usual all-black attire with Nike sneakers. But the impending move is also an opportunity for Greenberg think about how his collection will enhance, and interact with, the new space, especially since there'll be so much more of it—200,000 square feet on the 11th and 12th floors at 450 W. 33rd Street. "We're taking a lot of stuff out of storage. We're buying a lot of additional things. It'll be fun to see it come together," he said. "We're doing a whole exhibit of fish decoys. We're doing Chinese Buddhist art—things that go back to 4,500 B.C. There'll just be a lot of things." This is probably a good time to explain Bob Greenberg's taste in art, which does not run to Rembrandt or Gainsborough. He instead leans heavily toward the likes of Calvin Black and William Hawkins. Never heard of them? Well, that's sort of the point. Greenberg's devotion is to "outsider art"—pieces by untrained, and usually unheralded, artists who cared little for fame but were instead in service of a "singular vision," as Greenberg puts it, that only they could see. The idea of the untrained artist doing his own thing resonates personally and deeply with Greenberg. "I'm self-taught," he said. "There's a lot of people who are." Greenberg also collects and admires consumer objects from the past that were never sold as art, but inspire him because they are pure expressions of their time—typewriters, hi-fi turntables, overhead projectors and even motorcycles. (The new offices will have no fewer than nine of those on display.) The goal, Greenberg said, isn't just to decorate R/GA's new office, but to integrate the collection into the space as an expression of the agency's culture, which is itself a bit outsider: pioneering, edgy, untraditional. "I'm trying to make this place not look or feel like an attorney's office," Greenberg said. "One of the big things we'll do to make us not an insurance company is the art collection." And since Greenberg's chosen pieces are always evocative and unusual, his hope is also to have them do double duty as part of "an integrated, graphic look and feel," and as facilitators of his own employees' creativity. "Let's introduce people to some of these motivational, inspirational things," he said. "It'll make our work environment better." Before the movers show up, Greenberg gave Adweek an impromptu tour of his collection, some still on the walls and some already in storage, awaiting the moving truck. Ten of the pieces follow below.

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A Rare Look at Bob Greenberg's Collection of 'Outsider Art'

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara