One of the more interesting artist’s collections of the 20th century was formed by the American modernist sculptor Chaim Gross, who probably began accumulating in the 1920s while he was a young talent in New York and continued up to his death in 1991. His holdings, spanning such diverse areas as African and Oceanic, pre-Columbian and 20th-century American and European art, are still kept intact in Gross’s 7,500-square-foot Greenwich Village house, which functions today as the home of the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation in New York, of which I am executive director.

The objects in Gross’s fine art and tribal collections number in the thousands and are installed salon-style, or, in the case of the sculpture, crammed in cabinets, bookshelves and on radiator covers on the third and fourth floors, which were the family’s living quarters. The first three flights of stairs are wallpapered with fine art, mostly American and European Modernism, while the last flight leading up to the roof is densely packed with African and Oceanic pieces. Closets are stuffed, and even the elevator walls are covered with pictures. Obviously, Gross was a compulsive collector. But he acquired out of a deep passion for the art itself, and he was guided by an impeccable eye, one that sought out quality, not names and status.

Entering Gross’s home is like entering a time warp. To a large extent the collection tells the story of the New York art world from the early 1920s to 1961. Gross arrived in the United States in 1921 as a penniless Jewish immigrant from the Carpathian Mountains in Austria. In 1961 he moved from West 105th Street and bought his Greenwich Village home. At this point his major collecting slowed down and his collection was largely already defined.

By 1961 Gross had achieved fame and fortune. He had emerged as one of the nation’s most famous sculptors, one of the great figurative Modernists generally assigned by curators and critics to an artistic pantheon that included Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelman and William Zorach. Such major metropolitan museums as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art avidly collected Gross’s sculptures. He had been a "living exhibit" at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where he carved sculptures during the run of the event and was featured in a Life magazine story in 1951. He had won award after award, including second prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1942 "Artists for Victory" exhibition. He had numerous shows at commercial galleries, eventually being represented in his later years by Forum Gallery in New York, which handles his estate today.

While Gross’s new home had been built in 1838 as a stately townhouse, it had evolved into an art storage facility by the time it came to his attention. To acquire the building, Gross sold a painting from his collection, Joseph Stella’s "Madonna of Coney Island," to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the picture hangs today. Gross had stumbled across the work in a frame shop and like much of the art in his collection, he had paid a pittance for it: $180 plus one of his own prints.
 
Gross’s sharp eye constantly led him to work that was being overlooked or ignored, like the Stella. He made such radical purchases as "The Hunter," an oil by the self-taught African-American artist Horace Pippin, and O. Louis Guglielmi’s 1938 painting "The Hungry," acquired by trade with the artist’s widow. He bought four Marsden Hartley oils, including the artist’s last painting, at a time when Hartley was not fashionable. A large portion of Gross’s collection came through trades. Social and popular, he was constantly exchanging work with his friends and acquaintances, who included such famous modernists as John Graham, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Max Weber, Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Fernand Léger and George Grosz. And, of course, he knew all of the major sculptors, including Lachaise, Nadelman (who was his teacher at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design), John Flanagan, Zorach, Jacques Lipschitz and Alexander Archipenko. His intimate circle included Raphael and Moses Soyer, David Burliuk and Peter Blume, artists who, along with Gottlieb, he met at the art school at the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side, where he enrolled upon arriving from Austria. Other friends were Abraham Walkowitz, the surrealist Federico Castellon, the aging and overlooked painter Louis-Michel Elshemius, the Precisionist Francis Criss, Robert Gwathmey and Stuart Davis. In addition to works by all of these artists, his collection includes early paintings and drawings by Louise Nevelson, who was his student at the Educational Alliance. And then there were the many smart buys, like the Joseph Stella: works by Picasso, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, Amedeo Modigliani, Jean Metzinger, Ernst Barlach, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, André Derain and Jules Pascin, to mention but a handful. Decades before it became fashionable, he collected works by African-American artists including Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden and Benny Andrews. Rounding out his fine art collection are paintings and sculpture by his daughter Mimi Gross, as well as paintings by her former husband, Red Grooms.