Interview with Oliver Hoare

Oliver Hoare has been a powerful and dynamic presence in the Asian art world for some fifty years.  He joined Christie’s in 1967 and set up the first department of Islamic art at any major auction house.  By the time he left, seven years later, he was in charge of everything between China and Europe, carpets and Southeast Asian art included.

In 1975, he co-founded the Ahuan Gallery devoted specifically to Islamic art.  His first major project was building the collection of Sheikh Nasser al-Sabah for the Kuwait National Museum, which opened in 1983, assembling at the same time Nuhad Es-Said’s remarkable collection of Islamic metalwork, published in 1982.

In 1994, he arranged the famous exchange of the “Houghton” Shahnameh for Willem de Kooning’s painting Woman III, the latter then in the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

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