On 23 April 1988, 14 months after the artist’s unexpected death, the sale of Andy Warhol’s personal effects began in New York. There were 10,000 items up for auction. In the six-volume catalogue that Sotheby’s published for the occasion, these lots seem to fit neatly into a connoisseur’s categories: art nouveau and art deco, drawings and prints, Americana, an entire volume devoted to jewellery and watches. The auctioneers had photographed much of this material at Warhol’s house on East 66th Street; his Native American artefacts are lavishly arrayed on the Sheraton dining table, spilling on to 14 Ruhlmann chairs. The impression is of a keen but democratic aesthete’s eye; folk art and mass-produced gewgaws caught Andy’s fancy as much as aspirational antiques. But the photographs record a canny fiction. Sotheby’s handlers had elegantly corralled an astonishing mess, the product of Warhol’s conspicuous but oddly secretive shopping habit. They had turned a morbid, chaotic hoarder into a proper collector.

The elegant distinction between pathology and taste is one of the subjects explored in Magnificent Obsessions, the Barbican’s new survey of artist-collectors present and (recent) past. It is in some respects a familiar theme, recalling those artists for whom rampant acquisition and attentive ownership of ancient or novel curios were essential to the making of their own work. In her introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue, curator Lydia Yee points to the teeming collections of African and other native artworks amassed by Pablo Picasso and André Breton. The latter’s home on rue Fontaine in Paris, with its thousands of objects, dust-furred over decades, became a monument to the juxtaposing tendency in surrealism, and a wall from the apartment, containing 255 artefacts, can be seen at the Pompidou Centre. As Yee reminds us, great artists have often wrestled with the urge to collect and the domestic or financial ruin it can bring; bankrupted in 1656, Rembrandt was forced to sell his bristling cabinet of exotic shells, corals and animal specimens. Others used their collections directly to inform their art, as for example the Japanese prints bought by Degas and Monet.

Magnificent Obsessions’ treats are of a more limited historical span – broadly the past half-century – but the show is a rich testament to varied desires and uses. Some collections are near-tautological in terms of their proximity to the artist’s work. We might have guessed that Damien Hirst owns many human and animal skulls, examples of pitiable taxidermy (a seven-legged lamb) and anatomical models – the last category including a guide to the removal of nasal polyps. Hirst, like many artists in the show, began collecting as a child. There is still something of a childish postwar wonder in the way that Peter Blake has filled his studio with elephant figurines and wrestling souvenirs. They contend for space today with elaborate taxidermy displays contrived in the 19th century by Walter Potter for his museum in Bramber, Sussex. As a boy, Blake visited the museum with his father on a cycling trip, and was amazed by a wedding party of stuffed kittens, a schoolroom full of rabbits.

Biographical origins are evident in a few of the other collections. Pae White started buying printed scarves and other textiles by the designer Vera Neumann when she recalled that women of her mother’s and grandmother’s generations all wore the designs when she was a child. Edmund de Waal’s collection of tiny Japanese netsuke, which he wrote about memorably in The Hare With Amber Eyes, arrived via a tortuous family history: the carvings were acquired by an aesthete ancestor in Paris, and later hidden from the Nazis by a servant in Vienna. Whatever their provenance, there are artists who need to have such things close to hand, whose daily studio practice requires the visual or tactile presence of suggestive mementos. They’re also in the interviewing repertoire of any art critic who pays regular studio visits; if the chat flags, ask about the shelf behind the artist’s head, because it is bound to have occasioned some recent work.

Several of the artists in Magnificent Obsessions are more like genuine connoisseurs and dealers, their collections growing parallel to their own art and taking on thrilling or distracting lives of their own. Howard Hodgkin was introduced to traditional Indian painting by his art teacher Wilfrid Blunt (brother of Anthony), and quickly outgrew his mentor’s expertise to become a notable collector and lender. For Hodgkin, acquisition, ownership and finally ridding oneself of the artwork seem just as much part of the drama of collecting as admiration of the thing itself; interviewed in the catalogue, he describes “the awful autonomy of the collection. It’s like Frankenstein’s monster … having something that you can’t even lock up in the cupboard.” Other artist-collectors seem generously to have styled themselves as relays in the circulation of artworks; Sol LeWitt lent most of his collection out to museums, and bought from artists (or composers such as Steve Reich) so that they might fund their own projects.

The American artist Jim Shaw, whose collection of thrift-store paintings includes many alarming clown portraits and some abject efforts at abstraction, speaks of his attraction to “the garbage of American culture’”. Shaw’s is the most uniform, dedicated collection in the pop-cultural line that runs through the Barbican show: a typology of failed imagery by painters so amateurish and obscure they would not even qualify as “outsider artists”. His diligence is almost matched by the photographer Martin Parr, who for many years has been seeking out luridly coloured postcards by photographers such as John Hinde, and buying an amazing selection of objects that commemorate the Soviet space dogs of the 1950s and 60s – a desk clock with Laika and planets, a cigarette case with Chernushka and enamel Kremlin. With such garish and forlorn objects from the history of mid‑century optimism, repetition with difference is the collector’s dream: “They need each other to make sense. You need a lot of them so that they become interesting.”

Then there is Warhol, whose interest, or attraction, or whatever it was, trumps even the most assiduous of his fellow artist-collectors. As a sickly and reclusive child, he gorged on Hollywood magazines; he and his mother would pore over the pictures and compose autograph requests to Mae West and Henry Fonda. With his first success as a commercial illustrator, Warhol indulged his taste for kitsch and somewhat desolate ephemera; an early apartment in New York was decorated with store signs, penny-arcade machines, carousel horses, a stuffed peacock and a table laid for a children’s party (complete with Coke bottles and iced cookies) which he had saved from a shop-window display. In time, and with vastly increased funds, he assembled collections of souvenirs from the World’s Fair of 1939 and countless colourful anthropomorphic cookie jars. It is not hard to discern a continuum between these relics of mass production and the commodities and their packaging that became the subjects of Warhol’s art. But the connections also make the art itself appear notably more nostalgic than it did at the time – pop art starts to look like a museum of childhood comforts.

All of this acquisition is to be distinguished from the “time capsules” that Warhol filled with studio detritus (including his own wigs) and carefully archived. That was work – the shopping was something else, something private and strange. By the time he ascended to the five-storey townhouse on East 66th Street, Andy was already half buried in a moraine of his own stuff. He shared the house with his assistant and lover Jed Johnson, whose advice was largely responsible for the number of art deco, Victorian and neoclassical pieces that Sotheby’s sold in 1988. They lived just a stroll from Madison Avenue, where Warhol went shopping every day towards the end of his life. The results of these excursions, Johnson recalled, were simply deposited about the house, often still in their bags, till the “illimitable welter” made certain rooms uninhabitable. Visitors were discouraged, and Warhol lived between bedroom and kitchen, locking the doors on his expensive clutter.

It’s said that each morning when he rose, and again at night, Warhol would unlock those doors and check in on the hoard, like some melancholy king out of a fairytale. If it is true, then what kind of collector was he? One who seems to have denied himself much of the pleasure and the work that Magnificent Obsessions suggests is at the heart of artists’ collecting. The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto says of his collection: “I want to live with these objects!” Edmund de Waal writes of the moment he takes an object from his pocket: “You begin to tell a story.” But can you live with things by burying them out of sight? It might be one way of loving them. And maybe once in a while Andy unwrapped a troubled dream in the form of a cheap or priceless treasure from years ago.

• Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector takes place at the Barbican, London EC2, from 12 February.