Former auctioneer Jeremy Cooper, annoyed by high prices, turned to a smaller-scale field. Now his collection – from Yoko Ono to Gilbert & George – is a book and exhibition
When Jeremy Cooper was a cash-strapped history of art student in the late 1960s, he hitchhiked around Italy collecting postcards from every church he visited. At the time, full-colour illustrated books were beyond his means, so the postcards were an inexpensive way of collecting high-quality images of 14th-century Italian art. His fondness for postcards remained and decades later, while he was working as an antiques dealer, he started to notice a large body of work that had never been fully explored: postcards created by contemporary artists.
Over the past 10 years, Cooper has been collecting postcards made by artists ranging from Yoko Ono to David Shrigley, Joseph Beuys to Marina Abramović, Gavin Turk to Gilbert & George. “The more I looked, the more I discovered that it’s a field of unrecognised historical significance – it just seemed completely neglected,” he says. “These postcards were made by artists as individual expressions, not just the reproduction of a work of art, which is what most postcards are.”
The project was largely born out of Cooper’s antagonism to the huge sums of money involved in art collection. Formerly an auctioneer at Sotheby’s, Cooper quit the job after becoming disillusioned by endless discussion of how much a piece of art was “worth” (he left the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow for similar reasons).
