Impresario of the New

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"Jeff, I loved the Puppy." From a few words, John Kaldor's contemporary art dreams can loom large. Such was the case, in 1995, when the Australian art patron invited American Jeff Koons to rebuild his 12-m-high topiary terrier in the forecourt of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. At a time when cutting-edge art was still frowned on in Australia, Puppy—which required audiences to do little more than stop and smile and smell the flowers—was a palatable panacea. Later purchased by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Koons' Postmodernist sculpture would become a global mascot for contemporary art. But back in Sydney, Puppy played a more practical role, too. Its presence helped usher audiences through into the MCA to see the country's best private collection of Minimalist art, from Carl Andre's bricks and Donald Judd's wooden boxes to Sol LeWitt's color-by-number wall drawings.

The quiet collector of these cool conceptualists, and Puppy's original benefactor, is John Kaldor. With his relaxed slate-blue suit and glasses, Kaldor appears more like a gentleman academic or architect. Yet in the dozen years since Puppy, the former Sydney textile magnate has fashioned for himself one of the more influential roles in contemporary art—and one with more bite than bark. As founder of Kaldor Art Projects and reigning commissioner for Australia's representation at the Venice Biennale, Kaldor is part impresario, part philanthropist. "John's role is more precisely defined as someone who is the visionary," explains Juliana Engberg, a curatorial advisor for Venice. He also happens to be just about the best-connected Australian in the art scene. Scroll through the membership of New York MoMA's International Council, and there are Kaldor and his partner, the Melbourne fashion-chain head Naomi Milgrom. At London's Tate Modern, the pair are listed just below Sir Elton John and David Furnish. "I didn't realize," says the softly spoken, Hungarian-accented Kaldor, 70, "but it is funny."

It is a rare moment of levity in Kaldor's super-serious pursuit of art. This can be traced back, he says, to the five months he and his family spent in Paris after fleeing the Communist takeover of Budapest in 1948. "My parents took me to the Louvre and the Musée d'Art Moderne," he recalls, "and I just fell in love with art." After Paris they settled in Sydney, where Kaldor would eventually take over the family textile business. But it was among the international avant-garde that he felt most at home. In 1969, Kaldor invited then-unknown conceptualists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to Australia, where they veiled 2.4 km of cliff just south of Sydney in 93,000 sq. m of synthetic cloth, the first of their public "wrappings." And in a dozen commissions since, Kaldor has not only brought a who's who of contemporary art to Australia, from curator Harald Szeemann to video artist Nam June Paik, but amassed a seriously cool collection in the process. His newest KAP recruit is installation artist Urs Fischer, this year's Swiss representative at the Venice Biennale along with Ugo Rondinone, another KAP alumni. "He's got a passionate eye," says Engberg, director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. "He's very intuitive about what he likes, but his intuition often pays off in that sense."

His intuition, as much as his passion, is being called upon in Kaldor's most public capacity yet as "visionary" for Venice. As one of four judges, including Engberg, who selected the three official Australian artists, and continuing in his "ambassadorial" role of commissioner from the 2005 Biennale, Kaldor has more than anyone else shaped Australia's presence at the world's oldest festival of visual arts. "Every city worth its salt wants to have a biennale," says Kaldor, who has attended his fair share since the early '70s. "But they can't outdo Venice. People come to Venice as a tradition. They come to Venice because it's so beautiful. They come to Venice because they'll meet everybody. It becomes like the World Cup of contemporary art."

One of the most conspicuous players this year will be Kaldor. Working closely with curator Engberg and the Australia Council for the Arts, he is responsible for rallying the extra support needed to stage the country's most ambitious national showing ever. In 2005, Kaldor raised over half of Ricky Swallow's $A1.4 million exhibition budget through private and corporate donors; this year he's aiming for $A1.2 million, and as Engberg puts it, "It would be a brave person who would say no to John." Come Nov. 21, when artist Callum Morton's resurrected Melbourne house will again be dismantled, something should remain of Kaldor's vision: what Engberg calls "a long-term legacy of patronage for this kind of ambitious scale of work."

Meantime, Kaldor just keeps on giving. Already plans are shaping up for the Urs Fischer installation on Sydney's Cockatoo Island, the lucky 13th KAP, which launches on April 19. Will it be the Swiss artist's House of Bread, an alpine chalet constructed of sourdough and home to four hungry parakeets? In any case, Kaldor insists "it will be wonderful. It will be wonderful."

With mild understatement, Kaldor says "it's very satisfying to look back" over four decades of art patronage—including, most recently, last year's video-in-schools pilot program—but perhaps his fondest memories are reserved for Puppy. It was beside its floral fur that Kaldor met Milgrom (he has three children from a previous marriage), in yet another example of life springing from art. "Well, it's a very happy sculpture. Very happy," says Kaldor, a Minimalist to his bones, but an art entrepreneur of maximum effect.