A man's world more sophisticated than that of today

If a great art collection is something that inspires you every time you look at it; that makes a great talking point … then I have a wondrous art collection

• Peter Aspden

It is a question that penetrates the sturdiest of social defences. The response to it is an instant indicator of taste, education, social status, cultural sophistication, and of course, wealth. I used not to have an answer to it at all. But now, things have changed. When I am asked “Do you collect?”, I can look my questioner — more often than not a fellow sufferer — in the eye, and say, “Why, of course”.

Collecting is a psychological condition as much as a pastime. It frequently borders on obsession and takes us to dark places, such as jealousy, greed and unauthorised overdrafts. It is a world in which there is no sense of measure: Just the imperative to have more. It is where the eye for a bargain is traduced by lust for the best.

My collection is passionately pursued, but modest. I would love to talk to you about my Cycladic figurines, or my Constructivist porcelain teapots, but I have been priced out of those particular markets for some time. I collect magazine covers. Specifically, American Esquire magazine covers. More specifically still, those that adorned the newsstands between 1962 and 1972.

This was the golden age of Esquire magazine covers. But let us not be too humble about it. This was the golden age of journalism. The team in charge of the magazine in that period, editor Harold Hayes and his art director George Lois, were both imaginative and fearless. Lois’s covers set new standards for the industry. The industry could not live up to them. I did not know any of this when I started what was to become my collection. I was keen only to track down one of Lois’s most famous covers, from April 1968, which featured a body-length portrait of Muhammad Ali with arrows sticking out of his bloodied torso, provocatively captioned ‘The Passion of Muhammad Ali’.

Christians and art lovers would immediately get the reference to Saint Sebastian. And boxing fans would get the metaphor: Ali was prevented from pursuing his career, at the prime of his life, because he refused to fight in Vietnam. He was another kind of religious martyr. When Ali first saw the proposed cover, he immediately phoned his religious leader Elijah Mohammad to ask if he should go through with it. When Lois first saw the finished result, he said to his photographer: “Jesus Christ, it’s a masterpiece.”

I found a good copy of the magazine on American eBay relatively easily. And then I became hooked on Lois’s other covers. They are, I freely confess, hardly obscure: New York’s Museum of Modern Art held a small exhibition of them in 2008. But they were new to me, and to others besides, I find. They richly deserve still greater exposure, because they are an art form in their own right.

My second purchase was Lois’s Christmas issue for December 1963. It was a photograph of the boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. There was no other text anywhere on the cover. The photograph was so closely cropped it could not help but look threatening. Hayes described it as “the perfect magazine cover”, its message potent. “The split in our culture was showing, the notion of racial equality was a bad joke, the felicitations of the season … carried irony more than sentiment,” he said. He also estimated that it cost Esquire $750,000 (Dh2.75 million) in cancelled advertising. It is the best piece of Christmas journalism ever.

The beauty of the Esquire covers is that they are matched, for the most part, by the quality of the writing inside the magazine. In a spooky montage from March 1963 — yes, 1963 — the head of Robert Kennedy is shown superimposed on a picture of his elder brother John. Inside, in a piece grim with irony when read with hindsight, Gore Vidal speculates that Bobby is the logical choice to win the 1968 presidential election.

In his waspish tone, Vidal describes the “splendid comedy” of Bobby and his wife Ethel receiving the logical positivist philosopher AJ Ayer as part of a regular study group they attended in Washington. Ayer proceeds to demolish most of the foundations of moral thinking before the befuddled couple. But Bobby won’t let it go. “But don’t you believe in right and wrong?’ he asks the finally exasperated philosopher. It was a stubbornness of vision that took Bobby a long way; but not as far as the 1968 presidential election.

Esquire was, and continues to be, a men’s magazine. But it was a man’s world that was in many ways more sophisticated than that of today. Of course we know that sexism was rife. But you wouldn’t divine that from Lois’s covers. Rarely would you see an exploitative image of a woman: The editorial team stood firm against an advertising department that was desperate for racier coverage of the incipient shift in the relationship between the sexes.

If a great art collection is something that inspires you every time you look at it; that makes a great talking point; that forces you to think of a more dynamic and creative time; that fills you with admiration for the vivid nonconformity of the artistic temperament, projecting worlds we dare not imagine: Then I have a wondrous art collection. And it has all been put together for less than the price of a decent suit.

My most recent cover comes from May 1969. It shows a prominent artist of the time, who appears to be drowning in a tin of tomato soup. It is captioned, ‘The final decline and total collapse of the American avant-garde’. But in truth, the art of Andy Warhol has fared pretty well since then. Well, you can’t be right all the time.

— Financial Times

A man"s world more sophisticated than that of today