Rare character
Keen of eye and wit, Brooks Buxton helps shape campus collections
It’s a crisp autumn morning, Saturday, and J. Brooks Buxton ’56 looks as intense as the late-turning maples outside the crowded auction gallery. He wants a painting, a signed, 19th-century Vermont village scene, but he’s not the only one. The bidders rally the price upward. A resolute nod of the head signals the auctioneer that Buxton is in, again and again, until his opponent finally drops out. As he prevails there’s one thing to know — the painting must be quite fine.
The definitive word on this distinguished international oil executive, art collector and philanthropist, from both those who know him and Buxton himself, is “discerning.” His knowledge base is deep; his interests, both in art and otherwise, exceptionally broad; his views, on the right day, merciless.
Buxton, it seems, only a couple of years retired from his position as president of Conoco Arabia, Inc., is having a good time. He can hold forth with no small flair on the president’s Supreme Court nomination, the programming on National Public Radio, the repression of women in Saudi Arabia, the quality of California’s art museums.
Fortunately for Vermont, Buxton is quick to turn his wisdom, his collector’s passion, and his strong sense of community in service of the University, as well as other institutions such as the historical societies of Vermont and Jericho.
“Brooks has strong and well-informed opinions,” says Janie Cohen, director of UVM’s Robert Hull Fleming Museum, where Buxton sits on the advisory board. “He has an impeccable eye and broad knowledge of art — both fine art and the decorative arts. He’s unusual in that.”
Buxton’s homes in Jericho and London showcase that diversity, with collections that range from early Vermont furniture to what Cohen calls “a terrific, important collection of modern British painters.”
And his knowledge of museums, Cohen adds, “is really profound. He has an astoundingly good memory. He knows the Fleming collection very well.”
Name an art museum anywhere in the world, in fact, and Buxton is likely not just to have been there, but to know its collections intimately. The Amon Carter in Fort Worth, Texas? Among the western art it’s known for, it seems they own a piece of birch bark signed in Vermont by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Headed for Düsseldorf? “They have an absolutely first-rate museum,” says Buxton, “modern, all done after the war; again, it shows you what money and taste can do, particularly curatorial connoisseurship, say, in contrast to the Getty...” And he’s off, with incredible tales of private entrée into the Louvre in Paris and other museums in other great cities.
WORLD VIEW
For this sixth-generation Vermonter, whose father left the farm to become a manager in the E.W. Bailey grain company, the love of art sparked early with boyhood trips to the Fleming and the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, and occasional trips to Boston and New York. Later, as a history major at UVM, he recalls visiting friends at Harvard and being teased for spending his days wandering the collections at the Fogg. But it was after graduation, a turn in the Air Force, and law studies at the University of Virginia that Buxton’s far-reaching education began in earnest with what would be a 40-year career overseas.
Working for First National City Bank and then, beginning in 1969, for Conoco, Buxton has lived in Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia. He was living in diplomatic quarters in Riyadh on 9/11 and stayed until he retired in 2003. Even with those difficult days toward the end, when Buxton says he was concerned for the safety of his employees as well as himself, he enjoyed and was informed by the multinational exposure.
Through his decades immersed in other cultures, Buxton developed a deep interest in Middle Eastern art and history, in Islamic architecture both ancient and new. He says he would “get after the Saudis” to let Conoco create a wall calendar that he thought could help improve their image in the west, “but they weren’t about to have their mosques photographed; they are too closed a society.
“(Riyadh) has some very handsome modern mosques,” he explains. “One was done like our friend Frank Gehry, hard-edged steel or aluminum…some others done with lovely pressed marble, reminding you of the Beinecke Library at Yale, this wonderful translucent marble that you could see through with this very strong, powerful light that you have in the desert.” With Buxton there is always the unmissed detail, the historical or cultural reference.
His own history took a tragic course 13 years ago when he suffered a non-trauma spinal-cord injury. Two discs in his back ruptured at once, one coming out in the typical way, the other going horribly awry, severing his spinal cord and paralyzing him from the chest down.
“It hasn’t slowed me down,” Buxton says. “Oh, a little bit of course. I can’t play sports any more.” Once an avid skier, his pursuits are more “sedentary” now, a word which makes his friend Bill Davison (see “The Art of Friendship”) scoff.
“He’s fearless,” Davison says. “The chair doesn’t get in his way.”
One could ponder whether a person sitting in a wheelchair while on safari in Ethiopia, as Buxton was a few years ago, could be called sedentary, but Buxton is really too busy. Last year he traveled alone to India to see Moghul architecture and collections of Indian miniatures in New Delhi. He’d been several times, but not since his injury.
Some of the stories are hair-raising — sitting on a train watching his wheelchair on the platform, hoping someone puts it on board — so Buxton is not unrealistic about his vulnerabilities. It’s simply that endless curiosity and pleasure in the world drive him onward.
EYE ON UVM
Despite living this large and exotic life, Buxton never questions where home is. “Your roots somehow reassert themselves,” he says, “and you want to come back to Vermont.”
It’s not that he views it as quaint. Buxton values the state’s tradition of tolerance and inclusion, along with what he calls the intellectually challenging social exchange. “It makes living here much more rewarding,” he says. “Also, I think many Vermonters have had for generations this concern for their neighbor, for public service, and I think that’s unique in the country.”
Certainly Buxton is at the forefront of community support. Even in his years abroad, he always maintained strong ties to UVM, targeting his efforts on the Fleming and Special Collections at the Bailey/Howe Library. Now that he’s back, his involvement is huge.
“He really wants UVM to shine,” says Connell Gallagher, director of Special Collections. “He wants to do everything he can to make UVM the greatest university that it can be.”
Both Gallagher and Janie Cohen of the Fleming say that one of the ways he does that is to watch auctions and galleries, bringing items that might be of interest to their attention and often purchasing them for their collections. He’s also contributed to important conservation efforts, including underwriting work on a 17th-century painting by John Michael Wright, the centerpiece of the Fleming’s portrait collection.
Buxton’s gifts to the University over the years are probably the best illustration of his capacity to appreciate different genres of art — and his strong desire to develop that trait in students. While UVM, according to Gallagher, has what may be one of the finest book arts collections in New England, it had no books by British earthwork artist Richard Long until Buxton donated two of Long’s most experimental books to the Rare Book Collection. Papers of River Muds, for example, is a book of handmade papers containing mud from rivers around the world, from the Nile to the Avon to the Hudson. But Buxton also gave Special Collections a scrapbook he had come across that had belonged to a UVM student from 1923 to 1927.
Among the many donations Buxton has made to the museum are numerous pieces of Middle Eastern jewelry and artifacts and, most recently, two contemporary gouaches by Louise Belcourt from the Fleming’s recent exhibition, New Turf. His interest extends beyond the collections to the building itself and Cohen says they share a wish list of future upgrades to the facility. Her exchanges with Buxton, she says, are both a personal pleasure and a real help — his focus is, inevitably, right on target.
“It’s a pleasure interacting with him,” Cohen says. “His eye and his mind are really delightful. He keeps me on my toes.”
THE ART OF FRIENDSHIP
The day print artist and UVM professor emeritus Bill Davison first met Brooks Buxton at his home in Jericho, what struck him instantly was the garage. Buxton was looking for work by a contemporary Vermont artist and when he invited Davison out with his portfolio they entered the house through the side door. There on the back garage wall, where more ordinary folks might hang their tools, Buxton displays framed posters by artists as varied as Joseph Beuys, Richard Long, and Eugene Delacroix.
“Who is this guy?” Davison recalls thinking, but by the time he left he was seduced by Buxton’s quirky combination of genteel charm, sardonic wit, and razor intellect.
Asked, in Davison’s presence, his initial impressions of the artist, Buxton is wry, his tone aristocratic: “It’s a leading question, I suppose. This is like Harriet Miers being grilled.”
The pair closed a deal that first meeting — Buxton bought four prints, one of which he gave to the Fleming Museum — and started a friendship.
Over the past two and a half years, the artist and the collector have uncovered layers of commonality: they’re both from old Vermont families and grew up nearly in each other’s back yards. Their conversations are studded with reminiscences, fishing in the Lee River, learning to ski on the rope tow at the Underhill Ski Bowl.
But it’s more than nostalgia. Buxton and Davison share a deep connection to the University, a love for the landscape and history of the state, and an equal need to escape, now and then, to cities. Davison keeps an apartment in Manhattan; Buxton, who gets there a few times a year, is known for traveling up and down the avenues in his wheelchair to favorite museums and bookshops. And always there is art.
“There’s an integrity, a bite to it,” Buxton says of Davison’s work. And as a purist, he likes that Davison is a native Vermonter. Of course an artist can’t control how his work is interpreted and Buxton talks about a seasonality to Davison’s current Snow and Wounds series which he denies is intentional.
Davison began making the monoprints, which have an abstract, painterly quality confined within a grid system, during an early snow six years ago as he was undergoing treatment for cancer.
“It is known that individual flakes of snow, although extraordinarily similar to all others, have unique geometric ‘signatures,’” Davison writes in a description of the series.
But when probed about the meaning of the works, Davison is impatient. The title is “simply a convenience” that he likes the sound of, he says, every bit as edgy as his friend can be.
To Buxton, it’s all good. His own Snow and Wounds print hangs in his house above an early country table. “I like it because it looks like a Vermont quilt,” he says.
(for UVM staff)