Features

The Genius Collector

With Henry Kissinger at the summit; Simon de Pury and MacBain in 2001; with James Truman.

(Photo: Stephanie Berger/Courtesy of the LTB Foundation;Marina Garnier/Globe Photos; Patrick McMullan)

This is her first New York apartment. Every morning, she wakes up at five for an hour of Pilates on the floor next to the legs of her 26-person dining set, which she uses for her dinner parties, or, as she calls them, “think tanks.” She selects her outfit for the day from a duplicate of the set of clothes she has in London, where her three teenage children are in school, because she does not travel with luggage. Then she begins her toilette. MacBain was once a redhead, and her fingers and arms are still covered with light freckles. Nothing is ever out of place in her appearance; always wanting to look her best, she’s even commissioned Steven Klein to take a publicity portrait. Once, when we were talking, she went upstairs in her stilettos to her bedroom, and afterward a maid scurried down with her hair dryer, stuffing it in a cupboard in the kitchen for future emergencies.

On this rainy morning, she is taking meetings. One cannot imagine the view in her living room: The sun beaming off the Hudson at this height fills the West Side with a light rarely seen in the city, transforming the glass cube into a vessel of the sky. (MacBain bought two apartments beneath her as well, each at a price tag of about $15 million—the rumor that went around was that she bought them because she found the first apartment didn’t have room for a washing machine.) She hasn’t finished furnishing this place yet, except for a white sectional in the living room, a big dining-room table, and a Tony Cragg pillar in the corner, the silver stack of faces turned every which way like a weathervane.

“I look at it every day, and I see it differently every day because of the curves and many shapes of the mouth,” says MacBain, pointing at the sculpture with a slim hand. “It is a perfect piece of art for me, because it is an opening without limits, representing one day one thing and another day something else. I don’t like borders.” She locks eyes and gives one of her half-smiles. “I cannot be confined. I cannot. I cannot be confined in a cage.”

Her butler serves cappuccino on the thinnest bone china, setting a place with fine white linen. We talk about the international luxury-goods market and how hard it is to find special clothes in Paris today. Then our conversation takes an odd turn. With the pride of a child showing off a schoolroom drawing, she shows me a Xerox photo of a brain, sliced up into a dozen areas marked with topics like “empathy,” “imagination,” and “making sense of the world.” In the middle, a big blob is dedicated to one word: “creativity.”

“Do we not need a more creative brain in this era?” she has asked. “So many of the practices in our world were forged in the industrial revolution, but we are now in a new era. We must develop our brains with the energy and commitment we once used to develop our factories.”

The science of creativity has yet to produce even a definition of the term, but new genetics analysis and brain-imaging techniques have inspired promising research on creativity in topics like learning and recovering from trauma. The new breed of neuroscientists-slash-philosophers drawing connections between biology and human culture delight MacBain greatly, and she has funded a seminar at Columbia University titled “Art and New Biology of Mind,” attended by scientists and Calvin Klein.

But MacBain is in touch with creativity in a deeply personal, almost mystical way. “I am dyslexic,” she says, making it sound almost like a confession. When she was young, she was called stupid. “I lost my confidence then,” she says. “If you don’t have a fabulous memory to realize there’s two a’s or two p’s in a word, forget it, it’s as important as whatever’s in there, and what’s in there is the intuition to create something, which is truly more important. Later in my life, it took me a long time to figure out who I was, really.”

She streaks across the room in her pointy shoes to pick up a worn tan journal from her sideboard. The blue pages are filled with diagrams that look like a sun with rays coming out the sides; in the center of each sun, she’s written the title of one of her magazines or her new Website, artinfo.com. On the rays, there are topics like “education” and “philanthropy” and “Internet.”

“Leonardo used such thinking,” she says—that’s Da Vinci, the dyslexic—paging through the book slowly. “This is what I do every time I start a business.” She traces each one with a perfectly manicured nail. “These are my stars,” she says. “My creative stars.”