If the ‘art for art’s sake’ creed is to be applied here, which appreciates the intrinsic beauty of each and every work of art, Adler’s home is a mighty treasure trove that commands admiration.
A stone’s throw from Hyde Park, Pebble’s hallway is laced with beaded necklaces and nearly every inch of floor space is taken up by either a sculpture, ornament or embroidery. With the talented Adler as your host, it doesn’t take long to appreciate that every piece has its own artistic weight beyond the merely decorative. These are the tokens of Adler’s extensive travels.
“I’m constantly looking for new areas to travel to – that’s the fun part. Sometimes I really wish I read the newspapers because I’ll happily walk into a civil war to find items.”
The collection began when Adler visited India with a girlfriend, in quest of something more than the ‘hippie paradise’ of Goa. “When we hit Kerala I just fell in love with India. I thought: ‘How can I justify keep on coming back here?’”
“If you don’t know what you’re doing there, they’re going to take you to the cleaners, but I was asking for stuff that was so outside their realm of experience, based on my love of traditional tribal – traditional jewellery, headdresses, etc. – they thought I was crazy but they couldn’t cheat me. So that’s how it started.”
More impressive are the illustrious figures Adler’s home has opened its door to: buyers who scour his collection for their artistic pursuits. “The real joy of it is working with some of the greatest stylists, set, and costume designers in the world.” Beyoncé, Madonna, Alexander McQueen and John Galliano are among the few jewels of the art world to have stepped inside.
But Adler, it seems, has been surrounded by the arts all his life. “I grew up with music – my dad was a musician. I used to lock myself in one of the music rooms with a gramophone and ‘duet’ with Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie, playing my tenor sax. I was in heaven.
“Then I went up to Trinity in Dublin; there was no jazz band at the university and I was invited to join a blues band, ‘Bluesville’. We were these long-haired twits. Teenagers were completely repressed in those days by the dominance of the Catholic Church and you couldn’t do anything as a teenager. Then suddenly these idiots came out and it was a release.”
Far from being idiots, the members of Bluesville became Ireland’s first rock band, according to Bob Geldof and Bono. Adler’s time with them led to a tour of America, where he became fascinated with Native American art.
“When I started to see Africa I became less interested aesthetically with Native American art and started to put together quite large collections of the Kente Cloth and tribal African flags.”
He leaps up (having taken lessons not to break anything from his two cats, both called ‘Mitsu’) and retrieves a book he wrote: Asofo! African Flags of the Fante People.
“Asofo means ‘war people’. The aim of their flags was to goad the opposition and bolster their own side, without words – pre-advertising, but like advertising. They had to get this message and transmit it without words. The skill with which they used the graphics and the colours is…” he gestures a variant of ‘unbelievable’ with his hands.
It’s hard not to fall for Adler’s glint-eyed, heartfelt mannerisms. He does artistic appreciation without falling into indulgence better than most, through his lush, Californian-twanged accent. And what’s more, you trust his judgement. He hasn’t just seen enough to know good art. He lives, surrounded by it.
For someone so embedded in the art world, physically and metaphorically, I’m keen to ask how he manages to stay sane in such a sphere, where all taste is subjective and his is on display.
“By leaving it,” he chuckles. “It’s such a strange world. I have so many friends who are brilliant artists who simply can’t have a career in it. They can’t eat and they rely on others. It’s happened gradually, starting when conceptual art became ‘the thing’. My feeling has always been – and I get murdered for it – that none of these people are saying anything different to what Marcel Duchamp said when he exhibited a toilet and said, ‘This is a piece of art because I’m an artist and I’m exhibiting it’ – but it was a urinal. And although they’ve changed the format now and added hugely the shock-value, it’s the same thing.”
Views aside, Adler has the fortune to be able to call on eminent friends, for purposes that make you admire him even more.
‘For my last professional act in music, my dad was turning eighty – he played the harmonica, but he hadn’t made a record for years, but he was quite famous. And I thought what a wonderful surprise for his eightieth birthday to have a new album.’
Adler got to work, contacting the various faces he’d met through his artistic endeavours who would be able to help produce an album of George Gershwin covers – a friend of Adler Sr.
“Then I went to Polygram and said, ‘I got Elton John! I got Peter Gabriel! I got Sting! I got George Martin! And my father!’ The word spread and everybody wanted to be on the album; with those three on it, George Martin producing, Gershwin songs – that had ‘hit’ written all over it. It went dual-platinum.”
And his dad’s reaction?
“Oh, he’d never heard of anybody. Except for Sting.”
That must have stung. But then again, it’s only art – for art’s sake.
