Family Pride
December 2007
One century ago, as is the case today, the pleasures of art were the privilege of wealth. A handful of high-end picture dealers stayed near their rich clients, who for the most part lived in the industrialized Eastern cities. At the same time, purveyors of more affordable furniture and decorative objects sprang up to serve a growing urban middle class. Some of these galleries remain in business today, bearing histories that together form a chronicle of collecting in America. Art&Antiques looks at a baker’s dozen of these centenarians, in the order of their origination.The business known today as French & Company traces its roots to an 1840 furniture business in lower Manhattan called Marley&Co., which makes it probably the oldest firm in America selling fine and decorative arts. (But only by a hair; see Vose, below.) Marley was sold to Sypher&Company which, in 1907, was acquired by a man named French who sold European furniture, tapestries and some art. "The firm’s first important clients were William Randolph Hearst, who didn’t like paintings, and Samuel Kress, who did," says Martin Zimet, who acquired French & Company in 1968, nearly a decade after noted critic Clement Greenberg had helped the gallery open a modern art department. French & Company was located on Madison Avenue, in what is still locally called the Parke-Bernet building, until around 1972, when Zimet moved the inventory to his townhouse on East 65th Street for what was to have been 90 days. It is still there, giving new meaning to the phrase "living over the shop." In 1998 Zimet left the furniture business, turning over management to his son, Henry, who sells art spanning Old Masters to contemporary, by appointment only.
Vose Galleries of Boston, almost as old, has been led by six generations of Voses, thus their description of themselves as the oldest family-owned gallery in America. In 1841, Joseph Vose bought an art supply store in Providence, Rhode Island, and by the 1850s, his son, Seth, had edged the firm into the business of selling paintings. By the 1860s Vose was handling art by many living American artists such as Martin Johnson Heade, Albert Bierstadt, Alfred Bricher and John Kensett. Upon moving the firm to Boston in the 1880s Vose introduced French Barbizon painters to an initially resistant market—and since then the firm largely has stayed with American art. Today Vose occupies a five-story historic brownstone, displaying American paintings and drawings from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as some contemporary realist art, and rare French Barbizon works, displayed amid age-appropriate antiques. The gallery has handled more than 34,000 American paintings.
Like French & Company, Knoedler & Company originated in lower Manhattan, opening in 1846 in what was then the commercial heart of the city and moving uptown as the city itself did, today occupying a landmarked townhouse on Manhattan’s gallery-lined Upper East Side. Michael Knoedler sold prints and artist’s materials in his role as American representative of the French art dealers and print publishers Goupil & Company, but soon was selling important paintings by European and contemporary American painters to a distinguished clientele. Michael was succeeded by his bon vivant son, Roland, an effective businessman; Roland’s scholarly nephew Charles Henschel helped Knoedler build an international reputation. Indeed, the firm maintained a gallery in Paris into the 1970s, and in London into the 1990s. Knoedler’s clients have included towering collectors such as the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers and Mellons. In 1971 the business was acquired by the late Armand Hammer, whose family foundation maintains ownership. The firm’s highly regarded reference library contains more than 60,000 volumes.
A La Vieille Russie, as the name suggests, sells Russian art and antiques as well as European and some American jewelry from a two-story location on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park and the Plaza Hotel. It was a bumpy road to Manhattan, buffeted by a century of wars. The business began in 1851 in Kiev and immediately achieved success selling objets de vertu to the Russian aristocracy. Dislocated, to put it mildly, by the Revolution, the firm moved to Paris around 1921 and in 1941 opened its flagship store in Rockefeller Center, moving to its present location in 1961. ALVR boasts goldsmith and jeweler Carl Fabergé as an early client and today is renowned for the Fabergé pieces in its inventory of Russian Imperial treasures. Always family-owned, ALVR has been led by generations of Schaffers.
When John Snedecor opened his shop in lower Manhattan in 1852, he dealt from day one in what was then contemporary American art, quite probably making Babcock Galleries the oldest dealer to specialize in it. (E.C. Babcock, a co-director at the time of Snedocor’s death in 1917, took over and changed the gallery’s name.) Marsden Hartley figures prominently among the artists Babcock has championed. One director had the prescience in 1959 to acquire a truckload—literally—of Hartley paintings left unsold at the artist’s death; the gallery subsequently came to represent the artist’s estate. Other artists associated with the firm include George Inness, Thomas Eakins (Babcock was agent for that estate as well) and John Kensett, whose catalogue raisonné the firm is publishing. Says John P. Driscoll, Babcock’s sixth owner and director, "The firm continues to actively buy for inventory, acquiring more than 20 works by Stuart Davis in the last year and a half, as well as works by Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Charles Sheeler." It also handles works by some living artists.
James Graham & Sons opened 150 years ago in lower Manhattan selling furniture and decorative arts. Since 1955 the gallery has been located on the Upper East Side, and has long specialized in 19th- and 20th-century American paintings: American Impressionism, the Hudson River School, the Ashcan School, The Eight and the Stieglitz Circle. Graham is also associated with the paintings and bronzes of the American West by Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell, and additionally offers European sculpture, British ceramics and some contemporary art. Led by five generations of Grahams, it is the oldest picture gallery in New York under the same ownership. In celebration of its recent 150th anniversary, a sesquicentennial loan exhibition featured artists exhibited by the gallery, including Oscar Bluemner, Andrew Wyeth, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Guy Pène du Bois and Alice Neel. The latter, who has been the subject of seven Graham exhibitions, was represented by a 1968 portrait of Robert Graham Sr., the father of the current gallery head. Graham has published (May 2007) an anniversary book tracing its history and the development of New York’s art world.Stiebel Ltd., which has been long known as Rosenberg & Stiebel, was founded in the mid-1860s by Jakob Rosenbaum, the great-grandfather of current head Gerald Stiebel, who traded in small objets d’art. Early in the 20th century, the firm expanded its inventory, adding Old Master paintings and European furniture, and its locations, opening shops in Paris, Amsterdam, London and, in 1939, New York. Stiebel has always had a prestigious European clientele (including the Rothschilds), and after World War II, the firm bought stock from Europeans trying to rebuild shattered lives. Sometimes acting as agents for these distressed families, Stiebel placed important works in major museums as well as in private collections. Stiebel says they have directly sold more than 100 works over the years to the Cleveland Museum of Art, and more than 300 works from their gallery are in the Metropolitan Museum collection. In 2000, Stiebel moved to an East Side townhouse and now does business by appointment only.
Five generations of Wildensteins have built an eponymous business widely recognized for the quality of its art but also for its emphasis on research. Founded by Nathan Wildenstein in Paris in the 1870s, Wildenstein&Company specialized in French pictures and sculpture, but also maintained a growing inventory of Old Master pictures and works of art from other European countries. In 1903, the firm opened a New York gallery, and since 1933 has occupied an elegant five-story Beaux Arts townhouse on East 64th Street, now its global headquarters. (The firm has closed the Paris and London galleries but maintains a presence in Tokyo.) The highly respected Paris-based Wildenstein Institute, a reference library and photo archive, publishes scholarly tracts and catalogue raisonnés for artists ranging from Chardin to Gauguin and, perhaps most notably, Monet. (A recent exhibition of 62 Monet pictures at the New York gallery attracted 37,000 visitors.) Wildenstein has helped build some of the country’s most distinguished collections, including those of Henry Clay Frick, J.P. Morgan, Walter Chrysler and Walter Annenberg. In 1993 it entered into a joint venture with New York–based Pace Gallery to create PaceWildenstein, which handles major works of contemporary art.
Kennedy Galleries, founded in 1874 in downtown New York as H. Wunderlich & Company, specialized in American art from its earliest days. A principal of the firm, Edward Guthrie Kennedy, was James Whistler’s primary agent in this country and the publisher of the standard catalogue of Whistler’s etchings. Kennedy took over the gallery upon Wunderlich’s death, eventually renaming it Kennedy & Company and then Kennedy Galleries. Lawrence Fleischman acquired 50 percent of the business in 1966, and the remainder in 1982. Fleischman was an ardent collector of American art and a co-founder of the important Archives of American Art, which in 1970 came under the aegis of the Smithsonian Institution. "My parents collected American art until they began to deal in the field, and then switched to ancient art, to avoid competing with their clients," says Martha J. Fleischman, who has run the firm since her father’s death in 1997. The gallery was noted for publishing the scholarly American Art Journal from 1969 to 2004, the year before the firm closed its public gallery and started doing business privately from offices on Madison Avenue. Kennedy Galleries continues to deal in American art from the late Colonial period to the 1950s.
Kansas City, Missouri, in the late 1800s was a busy commercial hub, the "Gateway to the West." Here, William Wadsworth Findlay launched the Findlay Art Company in 1870 to sell paintings to ranchers and travelers with money in their pockets. His descendants have remained in the business, down to great-great-great grandchildren. Between 1935 and the early 1960s, the business opened galleries in Chicago, New York and Paris. Today, there are four offshoots of the original Findlay Art Company, all in New York, and three still run by Findlays. David Findlay Galleries, doing business since 1938, is on Madison Avenue and managed by fifth generation Michael Findlay; Peter Findlay Gallery, open since 1972, and David Findlay Jr. Fine Art, owned by Peter’s brother, are in the Fuller Building on 57th Street. Wally Findlay Galleries is no longer owned by a family member.
Charles Kraushaar founded Kraushaar Galleries in New York in 1885, selling Dutch and French Barbizon pictures. He was joined by his brother, John, who inclined toward French painters but grew increasingly interested in the work of living American artists, in particular The Eight. Indeed, Kraushaar stood by a struggling John Sloan for decades, and the gallery, appropriately enough, came to represent the Sloan estate. John Kraushaar was succeeded by his daughter, Antoinette, muse to so many—she was painted by George Luks and Gifford Beal, and Gaston Lachaise created a marble portrait bust of her. Carole M. Pesner, Kraushaar’s longtime president, reports that the firm continues to work with a few contemporary artists but primarily maintains its specialization in American art from 1900 to 1950, and, she says, "we are here for the long haul."
On a sleepy block of Lexington Avenue far from New York’s main gallery circuit, The Old Print Shop, founded in 1898, has remained in the same location since 1925. And since 1928, when Harry Shaw Newman, a supplier of prints to the shop, purchased the business from the widow of founder Edward Gottschalk, it has been under the leadership of three generations of the Newman family. A cozy space, on the face of it little affected by anything that may have happened in the past century, the firm today specializes in American graphic arts—that is, original American prints starting as early as 1700, antique maps printed prior to 1850, drawings, watercolors, fine art photographs, art books and artist’s books. The firm helped popularize the name and works of John James Audubon and Currier and Ives, and similarly, is closely identified with the genre known as American urban views.
Though the names Ginsburg and Levy are inseparably connected to fine American antiques, the founding pair of cousins actually began by selling curios when they opened their business in 1901 on New York’s Lower East Side. The firm quickly moved on to European and American furniture and accessories, eventually focusing on important Americana. Perched at the pinnacle of the finicky world of Americana for many years, Ginsburg and Levy served as a resource to the country’s most committed and particular collectors, including the likes of Henry Francis du Pont, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Electra Havemeyer Webb and Ima Hogg. The founders’ descendants, Benjamin Ginsburg and Bernard Levy, dissolved the original corporation in 1976, each going on to maintain a separate business. The Ginsburg firm closed in 1983. Today the firm of Bernard & S. Dean Levy occupies a five-story townhouse on the Upper East Side, where it continues to service the country’s top collectors.
With all the fleeting fads and changing values, it’s heartening to know there are some constants in the art world.
Roberta Maneker, an Art&Antiques New York correspondent for 10 years, has held executive positions at Christie’s and Phillips de Pury and Company.