Annamaria Edelstein, beat inflation by investing British Rail’s pension fund in 2,400 works of art
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Annamaria Succi Edelstein: intelligent, financially literate, strong-willed and fluent in four languages
Annamaria Edelstein, who has died aged 89, was the brain behind the British Rail Pension Fund’s astonishing art collection in the 1970s, the largest systematic experiment in art-as-an-investment.
The idea of buying art as an inflation-proof alternative to stocks and shares had gained traction in the 1960s, in response to English stagflation and an eye-catching series of international art auctions in London, cultivated by Peter Wilson, the dynamic chairman of Sotheby’s. In 1966 Wilson told the BBC’s Money Programme that “works of art have proved to be the best investment, better than the majority of stocks and shares in the last 30 years”, and launched the Times-Sotheby’s Index to give a scientific-seeming framework for collecting art for profit.
British Rail rose to the bait. Christopher Lewin, one of the investment advisors for their pension fund, was looking for a hedge against inflation of over 15 per cent in the 1970s. He approached the publicity-savvy Wilson at Sotheby’s, who jumped at the opportunity of selling to a well-funded new client.
Lewin, however, was shrewd enough to insist on an independent director of the fund, as he didn’t want Sotheby’s shovelling any old stuff in his direction. Wilson recommended Annamaria Edelstein, editor of Art at Auction, Sotheby’s annual illustrated survey of the art market, which she had transformed into a more glamorous publication.
Highly intelligent, financially literate, strong-willed and fluent in four languages, Annamaria Edelstein turned out to be an inspired choice for the British Rail collecting role, able to keep the acquisition programme high-quality while holding her own against hard-nosed commercial dealers. Her time at Art at Auction, liaising with the departmental experts, had given her the art education she had foregone for accountancy as a student in Milan.
A portrait of Annamaria by her husband Victor Edelstein – courtesy of family
Beautifully dressed, with an indefinable Italian chic, she had a reputation for being charming but intimidating, especially to those who had not yet tuned into her dry humour. But when she directed the “beam of her attention”, as one colleague put it, she was irresistible. For her part, she admitted that she was “bloody-minded” but thought it rather “a good characteristic for somebody who had to put a collection together without being influenced by anyone”.
The venture was controversial to some outsiders: mixing the Beauty of Art with grubby commerce. But Annamaria Edelstein made a success of it, both economically and culturally, creating an ideal collection of the finest art across history, akin to the Renaissance concept of “The Paper Museum”.
In 1974 British Rail agreed to invest 3 per cent of its £ 1.3 billion pension fund in art, setting up a sub-company, Lexbourne, for acquisitions, with Annamaria Edelstein in charge. She organised a panel of experts from Sotheby’s and the wider London art world to pick the best across the range of the art market at a boom time for great sales.
As she told James Stourton in Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market 1945-2000, “I never had so many friends” – a wry comment on the way many dealers, especially those who had been most fawning, later dropped her the moment she ceased to wield such power and influence.
Anonymous agents were appointed by her to bid secretly so that sellers could not guess British Rail’s interest and inflate prices. She thoroughly enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger aspect of all this. She sometimes got annoyed when Lewin, acting in British Rail’s interests, turned down masterpieces on which she had set her heart, including a painting by Guercino which went to the National Gallery instead.
Nevertheless, over the five-year buying period, she acquired spectacular objects such as the record-breaking English bronze Romanesque candlestick from the von Hirsch collection, a notorious Tang horse and a Riesener console table from Marie-Antoinette’s apartment at Versailles, which made huge profits when re-sold, as did Renoir’s La Promenade which went in due course to the Getty Museum in Malibu.
Not everything did as well; tribal art and coins, for instance, failed to live up to expectations. But as the Wall Street Journal observed, “every one of the 13 categories of art invested in by the pension fund brought more money when sold than the fund had paid”.
By 1980, she had spent £40 million on 2,400 paintings and objects. The collection was lent to various British museums, but although the intention had been to hold on to the investments for at least 20 years, the art was re-sold in batches from 1987 onwards when British Rail was “privatised” and management and priorities changed. (Running an efficient train service has never been one of them.)
The experiment was judged to have raised £170 million for the pension fund, a return of over 11 per cent a year – comfortably beating inflation, if not quite equities.
Annamaria Edelstein at her easel
She was born Annamaria Succi in Milan on December 6 1935 to Mario Succi, a banker, and his Sicilian wife Maria Teresa Mormina. Her parents separated when she was small, and her mother started a fashion house in Milan called Silhouette.
Annamaria was educated at a convent, and at her father’s urging studied accountancy at college, when she would have preferred art. She came to London in the 1950s to study English, and later lived in Paris for a time, working in the legal department of the Ministry of Agriculture as an editor and proof-reader. Eloquent in whichever language she was speaking, she liked to pepper her sentences with evocative Italian words like “sfortunatamente”.
In 1961 she met and later married Iain Macdonald, a Shell executive based in Milan. They settled in London, but his work soon took to them to Glasgow, then Birmingham. When she saw the last of these at the peak of its 1960s architectural self-vandalism, she burst into tears and wondered what she had done for God to punish her by sending her to the third circle of hell.
They divorced and in 1969 she met Victor Edelstein at Felix Hope-Nicholson’s house in Tite Street, where a friend in common, the icon painter Slobodan Paich, was a lodger. In 1973 Annamaria and Victor embarked on a hugely successful marriage that would last over 50 years, during which time Victor Edelstein became the leading English couturier of the 1980s, the “Oscar de la Renta of London”, famous for his creations for Diana Princess of Wales.
Annamaria herself was noted for her wonderful clothes and jewels – jade, amber, amethysts and Italian pectoral crosses – and the decoration of her and Victor’s successive houses were manifestations of their shared sense of style.
After London, they lived in Spain for a time, and then in considerable splendour near the Church of the Assumption in Venice for 12 years, but latterly, finding the heat of the Venetian summer and the volume of Chinese tourists unbearable, they moved to a converted stable block at Sherborne in Gloucestershire.
A painting by Annamaria Succi Edelstein
After leaving the British Rail pension fund, she had spent a decade as a successful London dealer in Old Master drawings, based in Jermyn Street, where her offbeat good taste came to the fore, then from 1995 she became a professional painter, principally of still lifes and landscapes, exhibiting a dozen times in London, Milan, Venice and Sherborne. At home, she and Victor would spend their days painting with their easels side-by-side.
Annamaria was also a fine cook, noted for her dashing Anglo-Italian recipes such as casserole of venison and turnips: chopped, rolled in flour and myriad herbs, covered in a bottle of wine and cooked for hours in a green lard-lined Le Creuset pot. She never bothered to measure her ingredients. When someone asked how she managed to get he​r soufflé to rise so well, she quipped that she could get a rise out of anything except Sotheby’s, referring to her meagre salary there.
She is survived by her husband Victor.
Annamaria Edelstein, born December 6 1935, died December 22 2024​
