C4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2020John Richardson, the art historian and Pi-
casso biographer who died last year at 95,
was a collector. He collected friends — Pi-
casso, Georges Braque, Francis Bacon, Lu-
cian Freud and Andy Warhol, to name only
a few. He also collected images of friends,
by friends. He had a portrait of Mick Jagger
by Warhol and an etched self-portrait of
Freud.
He also had six prints by Picasso. And he
had an oil portrait of himself, painted by
Freud. The Picassos and the self-portrait of
Freud will be sold at Sotheby’s in New York
in the fall, with bidders online or on phones,
and the Warhol will be sold in a single-lot
online sale in September. A monumental
landscape by the Symbolist painter Lucien
Lévy-Dhurmer and a pastel on paper by
Pavel Tchelitchew will be included in other
sales in the fall.
On Sept. 17, the gallery Stair is to sell fur-
niture and other items from Richardson’s
apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron
district of Manhattan.
Freud’s expressive portrait of Rich-
ardson will be displayed at Sotheby’s in
London until Tuesday but will not be sold: It
is bound for the National Portrait Gallery in
Washington, a gift of Richardson’s estate to
the American Friends of the National Por-
trait Gallery, a New York-based nonprofit.
Richardson was perhaps best known for
“A Life of Picasso,” a monumental biogra-
phy, three volumes of which have been pub-
lished. He was working on the fourth vol-
ume when he died, and it is expected to be
published by Alfred A. Knopf in fall 2021,
said Shelley Wanger, an executor of Rich-
ardson’s estate and a senior editor at Pan-
theon Books and Knopf.
Mary Bartow, the head of Sotheby’s print
department in New York, said that Rich-
ardson’s collection “came about because he
was a scholar” but that “Richardson as the
scholar morphed into Richardson as the col-
lector.”
“He started looking at Picasso,” she said,
“and realized early on how important print-
making was to Picasso. In fact, Picasso
made prints from 1900 all the way up to two
weeks before he died. Printmaking for him
was not just a way of getting his images out
there at a slightly lower price point to make
money; they were works of art that put him
in line with Rembrandt and Goya.”
Richardson’s museumlike apartment, a
block from Union Square, showed off a col-
lection that was idiosyncratic, personal and
lavish. “There was something about the
way he could put things together,” said Ben-
jamin Doller, the chairman of Sotheby’s,
Americas, who knew Richardson, “whether
it was old masters or contemporary sculp-
ture or Picasso drawings or Warhol or the
objects that he collected, the chicest mirror
you could ever find, or the way he would
drape a tapestry rug over a table and put
Chinese objects on it.”
Sotheby’s might seem an unusual choice
to sell items from Richardson’s collection,
considering that he opened the New York
office of its rival, Christie’s, in the 1970s. Ms.
Wanger said that both houses competed for
the sale but that the two grandnieces who
are his heirs “just felt very strongly about
Sotheby’s.”
One of the Picasso prints is “Picador et
Taureau,” a 1959 linoleum cut of a bullfight.
Picasso inscribed it to Richardson when he
gave it to him in 1960, the year he left the
South of France, where he had lived since- Sotheby’s presale estimate is $25,000
to $35,000.
“Self-Portrait: Reflection” is by Freud,
the figurative painter who died in 2011 at 88
(and whose grandfather was Sigmund
Freud). Phoebe Hoban, the author of “Lu-
cian Freud: Eyes Wide Open,” said in an
email that Richardson and Freud first en-
countered each other at the Slade School of
Fine Art at University College London, in- Sotheby’s estimated that “Self-Por-
trait: Reflection” would sell for $70,000 to
$100,000.
Another Freud etching to be sold is a por-
trait of David Dawson (presale estimate,
$25,000 to $35,000). Ms. Hoban said that
Richardson had told her that “David was
many different things to Lucian, not just a
studio assistant and a primary subject, but
a best friend.”
Ms. Bartow said the Warhol portrait of
Mr. Jagger, inscribed by the artist “to John
R,” was one of 10 in a series that was differ-
ent from the famous Marilyn Monroe im-
ages. Each image of Mr. Jagger was differ-
ent, unlike the Monroe set, in which only the
colors changed from image to image.
Ms. Bartow said that Richardson would
have noticed. “As a scholar who made his
living through his eyes rather than just
through reading things and interviewing
people,” she said, “he had the intelligence to
see that this was a different approach by the
artist.”A Collector of Art
And of Starry Friends
LUCIAN FREUD; VIA SOTHEBY'SLUCIEN LÉVY-DHURMER; VIA SOTHEBY’SSotheby’s and others will sell
personal treasures owned by
the historian John Richardson.
By JAMES BARRONAmong the pieces owned by
John Richardson were Lucien
Lévy-Dhurmer’s “Paysage
Montagneux,” top left, and
Lucian Freud’s portrait of
Richardson, above.“So it was natural,” he added, “to be in
that conversation with her, and when Covid
hit, that situation sharpened.”
Their talks accelerated, Mr. Brown said,
after Art Basel canceled its principal art fair
in Switzerland in June. “It was clear that the
economy of the art world was so different,
and that conversation became very con-
crete,” he said.
Ms. Gladstone, whose gallery has three
locations in New York and one in Brussels,
echoed Mr. Brown’s contention that the art
market was at a turning point.
“I think that this moment in history is an
important time to think of new possibilities
in the art world,” she said in a statement.
“This new alliance with Gavin feels natural,
evolutionary and auspicious.”
The 10 artists joining Mr. Brown at Glad-
stone are the performance art trailblazer
Joan Jonas; the video artists Ed Atkins, Ar-
thur Jafa and Rachel Rose; the photogra-
pher LaToya Ruby Frazier; the painters
Kerstin Brätsch, Alex Katz and Frances
Stark; and Mr. Tiravanija and Mark Leckey,
both unclassifiable polymaths.
They constitute only a small fraction of
the artists on the G.B.E. roster. Many oth-
ers, including the Los Angeles painter
Laura Owens and the Belgian provocateurs
Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, will not be
going along to the Gladstone Gallery.
Mr. Brown trained as an artist at the
Chelsea College of Arts in London. In 1988,
he came to New York, where he enrolled in
the Whitney Independent Study Program,
worked at 303 Gallery and staged pop-up
exhibitions everywhere from his Upper
West Side living room to the Chelsea Hotel.
He opened Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in
1994 in a minuscule storefront near the en-
trance to the Holland Tunnel, where he
staged exhibitions by Catherine Opie,
Steven Pippin and Mr. Tiravanija, who
would offer free soup to gallerygoers.
G.B.E. later moved to a warehouse on
Greenwich Street, and as the gallery grew it
began to work with more established art-
ists, such as Mr. Katz and the Arte Povera
pioneer Jannis Kounellis.
When Mr. Brown lost the lease on his
space on Greenwich Street, he used the oc-
casion to restage one of Mr. Kounellis’s most
renowned artworks: “12 Horses,” from 1969,
featuring the horses munching hay.
Mr. Brown also ran a small artists’ bar,
Passerby, with a light-up dance floor de-
signed by the Polish artist Piotr Uklanski,which became a stamping ground for art-
ists, curators and writers in the late 1990s
and 2000s. The bar itself hosted exhibitions
in an adjacent room; one memorable group
show there was “Drunk vs. Stoned,” which
matched participants to either of those two
forms of intoxication.
The G.B.E. ethos, at once professional
and scruffy, endured when the gallery
moved in 2016 to a huge four-story space in
Harlem — a relocation that felt like a
pointed rebuke of the Chelsea art world. In
November 2016, a week after the election of
President Trump, the gallery premiered Mr.
Jafa’s “Love Is the Message, the Message Is
Death,” an arrhythmic video collage of
Black American joy and violence, which
drew lines around the block.
Mr. Brown’s gallery, while adventurous,
was no punk endeavor: It was a regular
participant at fairs like Art Basel and
Frieze, and presented big-ticket painting
alongside uncollectable experiments. But
midsize dealerships like G.B.E. were al-
ready being squeezed in recent years, as
the art market has grown into a global sales
network and a handful of major galleries
have taken a greater percentage of total
market share.
The closing of G.B.E. solidifies a tenden-
cy in the art world — sometimes called
“grow or go” — that has left midtier spaces
ever more endangered and has required
even well-established dealers like Ms. Glad-
stone to expand to keep pace.
Mr. Brown is skeptical whether the artmarket’s frenetic pace can or should re-
sume once the pandemic subsides, and he is
carrying his doubts with him to Gladstone.
“I think we both know that there needs to
be something more, or something else, es-
pecially now,” he said. “To imagine we can
all start again with business as usual is a
collective delusion.
“In that sense, I think that perhaps the
timing of this is good,” he said. “The chal-
lenge is the general anxiety about the state
of this country, politically and socially and
spiritually. There’s a wish for things to shift.
I think there’s a hunger, in contrast to every-
one’s current lived experience, to be con-
nected. Or to live inside a more visceral,
present reality.”Top Art Dealer Joins Forces With Another
Gavin Brown’s gallery, which he opened in
1994, has flaunted a certain rebelliousness.ANGELA PHAM/BFA, VIA GLADSTONE GALLERYCONTINUED FROM PAGE C1FOR THE PAST 20 YEARS,in his second career
as a best-selling author, Howard Bloom has
been grappling with the big questions, all of
which can be boiled down to, as he puts it,
“What does the universe want from you and
me?” Bloom has, in the pre-Covid-19 world
chronicled in a new documentary about
him, a strict routine that helps him in this
discipline.
It includes morning exercise and consult-
ing a list of reminders of what to take with
him when he ventures out of his Brooklyn
brownstone. It also involves a staggering
number of medications, which he needs to
combat his chronic fatigue syndrome,
which struck him in 1988 and left him un-
able to step out of his bed, let alone his
apartment, for many years.
Directed by Charlie Hoxie, the documen-
tary, “The Grand Unified Theory of Howard
Bloom,” is moderately engaging and credi-
bly portrays Bloom’s indefatigability. He
speaks of his aspiration to be a “24-hour-a-
day information processing device” and de-
fends his auto-didacticism by saying “grad
school looked like Auschwitz for the mind.”
That eyebrow-raising simile is emblem-
atic of Bloom’s bluff offhandedness, which
most likely served him well in his first ca-
reer as a high-profile music publicist. (Re-
calling his tenure representing Run-DMC,
he says, “We made rap.” Kurtis Blow and
others might like a word.)
The movie spends more time on Bloom’s
personality than it does on the ideas pro-
mulgated in such volumes as “The Lucifer
Principle,” for which the actor Jeff Bridges
contributes an onscreen blurb. And when
Bloom confides his plan to let a Dubai-based
fitness instructor and gym entrepreneur
handle his archives, we get into what looks
like some P. T. Barnum territory.GLENN KENNY FILM REVIEWOnce a Publicist,
Still a Personality
The Grand Unified
Theory of Howard
Bloom
Not rated. Running time:
1 hour 7 minutes. Rent
or buy on iTunes, Vimeo
and other streaming
platforms and pay-TV
operators.
Below, Howard Bloom,
a high-profile music
publicist turned
best-selling author.
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