When NFL great, football Hall of Famer and former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice, Alan Page and his wife Diane Sims Page, a highly regarded marketing consultant, built their contemporary home in Minneapolis’s traditional Kenwood neighborhood in 1973, they were making a radical break from the styles and expectations of that storied community by constructing a simple brown wooden box on a street that featured a mixture of stately Craftsman, Prairie-style and Victorian houses. The austere structure that the Pages built declared they were not afraid to be different. Soon, Alan’s bright yellow van would be stationed in the driveway.
Inside the completed house, adjacent open-plan, living and dining rooms featured Italian designer sofas, the dramatic arch of a floor-to-ceiling Achille Castiglione lamp, and not much else save for stacks of Italian Vogues on a low-slung chrome coffee table. These gallery-like spaces were the perfect setting for Diane and Alan to entertain friends – including their extended Minnesota Viking family – and the huge bare walls eventually became home to two iconic Warhol screenprints, displayed for maximum impact opposite each other. For the Pages, Marilyn was an homage in the hottest of pinks and the most acid of yellows, expressing the exuberance of her personality and helping to ensure that her image as an American cinematic icon would remain searingly, indelibly vivid. The Mao portrait (see next lot) represented the popular fascination with Chinese culture and with Chairman Mao as a revolutionary, whose image Warhol irreverently transformed, layering pastel tones over Mao’s famous Red Book portrait.
“We were married in 1973 and building a new home. Reflecting a break from the past with an eye to the present and future, we wanted our home and décor to be very contemporary. We had both grown up with what we thought was stuffy and old-fashioned interior design. As part of our ‘backlash’ against that era we wanted crisp, clean, light, airy and open interiors. As the house was nearing completion, we purchased Marilyn from a downtown gallery in 1976. We did not know much about art, but we went looking for a Warhol – the only name in art that we recognized. We loved his Campbell’s Soup cans, the Marilyns, Lizzes and Chairmans. Marilyn was an icon and when we saw it, we knew. The huge scale and bright, vibrant colors appealed the most to us and made a perfect fit for our home, along with the portrait of Mao, which we bought shortly after.”
- Diane Sims Page
These contrasting pieces marked the beginning of Diane and Alan’s art collection, which would grow and evolve to include works by such artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Jim Dine, Carrie Mae Weems, Clementine Hunter and Charles White.
Diane and Alan responded to the works aesthetically, but also appreciated how Warhol re-purposed his favorite cultural icons and represented them through his own lens. In a similar way, the Pages were re-defining the American Dream for themselves, as a life lived on their own unique terms. They committed themselves to acting on their ideals while balancing ambitious careers and raising a blended, multi-racial family. Over the years, as their commitment to social justice grew to include Alan’s 26-year tenure on the Minnesota Supreme Court and the founding of the Page Education Foundation, which provides financial assistance to minority students in exchange for their mentoring of younger students, the scope of their collection changed.
Today, the focus of Diane and Alan Page Collection is still radical, but derives its impact from art, artifacts and Americana that speak directly to our unresolved racial history and its current legacy.