Ambassador Trevor Traina’s collected photographs are featured in a fall Christie’s auction
Words by CATHERINE BIGELOW
Photography courtesy of CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2024
Over merely 20 years, Trevor Traina — a San Francisco native, serial tech entrepreneur, and former United States ambassador to Austria — has amassed a blue-chip collection of images by groundbreaking American artists that showcases photography’s evolution from the post-WWII era to the 21st century.
But come October 3, Traina, 56, is in a selling mood.
Presented by Christie’s at its Manhattan headquarters, this single-owner auction, An Eye Towards the Real: Photographs from the Collection of Ambassador Trevor Traina, features 130 original works by artists including Ansel Adams, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Cindy Sherman, Garry Winogrand, Nan Goldin, and Larry Sultan.
But there is one piece that Traina is slightly verklempt to part with: The Red Ceiling by William Eggleston.
“We scoured the earth to find this work. It is so gorgeous in real life and incredibly rare, one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century,” Traina said. “Luckily, I have other fabulous Egglestons, too. But for people who are either interested in starting a collection or are already very attracted to photography, this sale is a treasure trove of works from which to choose, with prices ranging from only a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands.”
The photo auction waters were tested in May, when Christie’s included Traina’s Identical Twins, by storied photographer Diane Arbus, in its 21st Century Evening Sale amid the auction house’s Spring Marquee Week. That exemplary yet haunting photograph, often appropriated in millions of memes, fetched a new auction record for the artist’s work: $1.2 million.
Traina’s collection, many of which he purchased from Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, also bears the pedigree of museum exhibitions. In 2012, works were featured at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. It has also been shown in Austria at the Albertina Museum in Vienna (2021) and the Hotel Schloss Leopoldskron Gallery in Salzburg (2022), site of the famed The Sound of Music estate.
“I’m not selling my entire collection. There’s an element of housekeeping at work,” Traina said, laughing. “I have more artwork than I could possibly fit in my homes. And I was possibly in danger of being reported as an artistic hoarder to the relevant authorities. So it was time.”
Traina’s art habits are a familial affliction. He cites his mother, Dede Wilsey, chair emerita to the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums board of trustees and a preeminent American collector, as an inspiration. His late father, John Traina, sourced the largest global collection of Fabergé cigarette cases and objets. Yet his wife, Alexis Swanson Traina, founder of the wildly creative HiNote, serves as a sort of referee.
“Collecting is an illness and I’m definitely incurable,” Traina admitted. “But Alexis has to live with my collecting habits. She retains veto power: Anything she does not like will not go on on our walls. Alexis is my ultimate art critic.”
When Traina was appointed in 2018 by former President Donald Trump to his ambassadorial post, a position also held by his grandfather, the late diplomat Wiley T. Buchanan, Jr., the couple decamped to Vienna, packing 65 pieces from Traina’s collection.
“Having those works of art with me in Austria helped me do my job of telling the story of America. The works I chose were either by American artists or depicted America,” Traina said. “Even though my appointment was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, my photography collection assisted in painting a picture of my diplomatic mission in speaking on behalf of 340 million Americans.”
Since the early dotcom days, Traina has successfully sold five of his six startups. Currently he is founder-CEO of Kresus, a web3 crypto digital wallet superapp. In January, Traina was named chief business officer of Tools for Humanity, a tech company cofounded by artificial intelligence pied piper Sam Altman (also cofounder-CEO of OpenAI), which is the parent company of the biometric WorldCoin cryptocurrency network.
In partnership with Kresus, Christie’s will present all sales from Traina’s auction on the blockchain, offering an associated digital certificate of ownership exclusively included within a Kresus wallet.
For those of us among the digital-blockchain unwashed, Traina explains, likening the concept to that classic line from The Graduate: “There’s a great future in plastics.”
“The blockchain is really transformative. It doesn’t mean ‘crypto.’ Crypto is part of the blockchain, but the blockchain is exponentially larger. It’s an underlying structure that will underpin many transactions in the future,” he says. “It is also immutable, which means once something is placed on the blockchain it can’t be faked, ignored, or lost. That technology is crucial for artificial intelligence. AI models rely on inputs, and the more fixed and reliable those inputs, the better the outcome.”
But, at heart, for Traina and his varied collections (including Old Masters and vintage cars), is the emotion of collecting.
“The recent Christie’s auctions of The Ann and Gordon Getty Collection really sparked the idea for my sale. It was such a beautiful insight into the collector’s eye of Ann Getty and her superb level of connoisseurship,” he said. “It made me realize I shouldn’t wait until the end of my life for people to experience what inspired my collector’s eye. As a passionate lover of photography, my hope is this auction inspires new thinking, and a new moment for a broad range of collectors to appreciate how much fun there is in the art of photography.”
Ahead of this sale, Christie’s presents a selection of works for preview at its Los Angeles locale September 10 through 12.
Feature image: WILLIAM EGGLESTON, Greenwood, Mississippi (Red Ceiling), 1973.
August 1, 2024
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