Top 200 Collectors

Peter Simon once said he can’t remember how he started buying art seriously, but all the works in his collection have “a story behind their purchase,” he wrote in a missive titled On Starting an Art Collection—“and I enjoy my relationship with these works.” So do his employees, as Simon has installed more than 300 artworks—spanning painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, and video—at the corporate offices of his company Monsoon Accessorize in West London. Founded in 2000, Monsoon’s art collection echoes the focus of the company (devoted to clothes with ethical origins sourced from India, Afghanistan, and the Far East), and it features works from such places as Central and South America, Africa, and Asia that orbit around themes of travel, globalization, diversity, and cultural exchange. 

The collection’s beginning can be traced to a few works: Kimsooja’s Bottari Truck (1997), David Hammons’ African American Flag (1990), and Alighiero Boetti’s Mappa del Mundo (1988). The first piece Simon purchased for Monsoon was a 2.5-ton truck loaded with colorful Korean silks that the artist Kimsooja had driven through Asia and parts of North America and Latin America. (Coated with the dust of its travels, the truck was displayed in the foyer of the Monsoon Building.) Today, the collection also includes works by Avery Singer, Francis Alÿs, Glenn Ligon, Enrique Metinides, Beatriz Milhazes, Gabriel Orozco, Raghubir Singh, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Akram Zaatari. Simon’s family collection, however, takes a slightly different tack: starting in the 1990s and largely “made in England,” it favors British modern and contemporary works by artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, and Christopher Wood.