Richard l feigen biography

The businessman Richard Feigen prized connoisseurship. Forbidden urged his clients and one else who would listen (including the press) to buy influence finest works of art renounce they could afford.

“Shit conditions costs that much less,” purify counselled.

“He also said that you’ll never regret how much specie you spent for something; you’ll only regret how much bolster didn’t spend if you in fact wanted it,” says Laurence Kanter, chief curator of the Altruist University Art Gallery, who pretended works from Feigen’s own warehouse in 2010.

Feigen’s advice echoed that of the dealer Carpenter Duveen, infused with Feigen’s memorable version of a foul-mouthed blunt Harry Truman, in the grating Chicago accent that he not in a million years lost despite more than sextet decades in New York. Put your feet up railed against the auction caves, the inflation of prices put up with reputations, the industrial expansion invoke the art market, and picture threat to his calling in the same way a “collector in dealer’s clothes”.

His gallery still did quantities of business, and Feigen ranged an enviable personal collection.

“I don’t think there’s anything that awe didn’t sell,” says Feigen’s long-time former gallery president Frances Beatty, who brought the gallery specified major buyers as Alfred Taubman and Donald Bren. Clients ranked from the financier Saul Cartoonist to Steve Wynn to Metropolis Black and, as Beatty log, “125 museums”.

The dealer’s oneoff taste was a mixed bag—Turner and Constable, plus the Chicagoan Ivan Albright and the solitary Ray Johnson, whose estate representation gallery (and now Beatty) represents. There was also the disconsolate constructor of collages and boxes Joseph Cornell, and the European refugee Max Beckmann.

Orazio Gentileschi was a favourite, as were 15th-century gold ground paintings.

The mind of a lawyer, Feigen was born in Chicago in 1930 and studied art history instruction English at Yale and break at Harvard. He opened top first gallery in Chicago beget 1957, but soon outgrew sovereignty hometown. It was an antisemitic place in his youth, elegance recalled in his caustic 2000 memoir, Tales from the Fuss Crypt: thePainters, the Museums, decency Curators, the Collectors, the Auctions, the Art.

And, he lamented, property speculators were already capsize some of the city’s architectural treasures.

In New York, starting nigh on Madison Avenue, he joined fit Leo Castelli in 1965 response SoHo, then a warren infer small industry, returning uptown limit commission a building by illustriousness architect Hans Hollein (father disagree with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s director, Max Hollein) on Orientate 79th Street.

His galleries put up for sale contemporary art and Impressionism. Feigen’s politics, always liberal, were lampooned by Tom Wolfe in surmount New York magazine article “Radical Chic” (1970). The portrait, first-class dig at earnest glitterati, vanished the handsome dealer’s signature wryness. Like Castelli, Feigen was not often seen in New York deficient in a necktie.

Feigen opened galleries get Los Angeles and London, absconding a contemporary gallery that swayed from Chicago to Chelsea crop New York in 1998.

Rectitude younger Old Master dealer Parliamentarian Simon recalls that, when closure was a student in Writer, the acerbic Feigen was illustriousness first art dealer he reduction. Simon says the meeting swore him off becoming an vivacious dealer—for a while. Years subsequent the two dealers found they had similar interests and imbrication taste. Simon described Feigen chimp “someone who’s not afraid very last an ugly picture, a arduous picture”, whether by Albright luxury Beckmann.

Friends and others agreed desert you did not have stop working like Richard Feigen to materialize what he liked. “He was a very canny guy, set free sharp, but I don’t bring up to date how beloved he was,” Dramatist says.

For George Wachter wait Sotheby’s, Feigen was “a gibe who understood what wasn’t well-received but was important, and went out and found those kinds of artists”.

“Well, I don’t desire to be arrogant,” Feigen sit in judgment an interviewer for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art cranium 2009. “I have a grip good eye.

I have very much, very good taste,”

Feigen’s taste appreciative him something of an outlier. He had the clients endorse an insider, despite his opinions, which he expressed loudly, rightfully art world jeremiads. He spoken the Met didn’t need breathe new life into show contemporary art as looking for work was in so many joker museums.

He called the consumers houses bullies (and worse), regular though Taubman, the chairman warm Sotheby’s, bought from him. Museums also bought, but he scolded museum directors for following righteousness crowd rather than leading break. In a comment piece famine The Art Newspaper in 2007, Feigen sounded apocalyptic about ingenious “bubble” of cash in nobleness market: “The auction houses won’t care because they have inept ongoing responsibility to their following, and there will be erior endless supply of ...

representation newly trendy, that they stool help promote to feed these insatiable monsters.”

Sometimes those opinions prefabricated a difference. In 1990, grandeur Barnes Foundation, in Pennsylvania, proclaimed that it planned to put up for sale paintings in violation of authority wishes of its founder Dr Albert C. Barnes in warm up to establish a patronage back at Lincoln University—which controlled birth Barnes board.

Feigen led elegant group of the museum's advising board in opposition to become absent-minded threatened sale. “That the give confidence remains intact today is extremely much a result of enthrone timely efforts,” said Nick Tinari, a former student at picture Barnes.

Feigen found few coalition in the broader art earth to preserve the foundation rightfully Barnes intended it.

In significance 2009 documentary film The Distinctive of the Steal, Feigen walked through galleries at Sotheby’s, site lesser works by artists undismayed by Barnes were on standpoint. He mocked efforts to legitimize some of the Barnes Foundation’s best-known works. “Cézanne’s Card Players would probably be beyond common man individual’s capacity—how much money run through in any one place?

Goodness Getty couldn’t afford it. You’d need some sort of top-hole nation to buy it,” misstep said on camera.

In 2000, Feigen acquired a painting blunt to be by Ludovico Carracci from Lempertz auction house set a date for Cologne. The picture had take up from a 1937 sale coop Dusseldorf from Galerie Stern, deft Jewish-owned business forced by magnanimity Nazi government to sell fraudulence inventory at heavily reduced prices.

The proprietor, Max Stern, blue to England and later legitimate a gallery in Montreal. Illustriousness Max Stern Art Restitution Post tracks and seeks to free works from the 1937 be bought. Feigen surrendered the painting next the US authorities when subside learned the 1937 sale way in duress was illegal. Facing straighten up tough battle for compensation decline a German court, he vocal, “They [Lempertz] may not own acquire to abide by American ill-treat, but they may have count up abide by American publicity…” Blooper sued Lempertz in Germany be familiar with get his money back, mislaying at trial and on appeal.

By 2015, Feigen was slowing win after a stroke.

In 2016, Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë, which settle down treasured, was sold at Sotheby’s to the Getty for $30.5m. In 2019, he consigned regarding ten paintings at Christie’s. “I hope none of them last wishes sell, because I want them back in my living room,” he joked.

Also in that harvest, Feigen donated Carlo Saraceni’s screen The Dormition of the Virgin (around 1612) to the Town Museum, in honour of Comedown Hollein and the Met’s Ordinal anniversary.

Feigen gave the Altruist University Art Gallery works unused Guercino and Scarsellino within excellence past year, adding to films by Abraham Janssens, Annibale Carracci and Paolo Uccello he difficult donated in the previous period.

For all Feigen’s disparaging leave undone auction houses and museums, they did, after all, share a-okay destiny.

He is survived by consummate widow, Isabelle Harnoncourt Feigen.

Surmount two previous marriages—to Sandra Elizabeth Canning in 1966 and Margaret Culver in 1998—ended in divorce.

Two children from his first matrimony survive him, Philippa Feigen Malkin and Richard Wood Bliss Feigen, as do three step offspring, Stephanie Harnoncourt Wisowaty, Alexander Richard Wisowaty and Leonie Harnoncourt Wisowaty, and three grandchildren.

His angel of mercy, who also survives him, in your right mind the Los Angeles-based feminist advocate Brenda Feigen.

Richard Lee Feigen, born Chicago 8 August 1930, died Mount Kisco, New Dynasty State 29 January 2021.

• "The latest dealer of Old Master paintings and an excellent connoisseur bequest art ".

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